Edge AI has no leader because it's shifting from a selling point to a component

Edge AI actually covers three separate things: decades-old embedded narrow tasks, PC and phone makers riding hardware refresh cycles, and the recent push for on-device large models. The giants making real money—Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, MediaTek—never call themselves edge AI companies; on-device intelligence is just a routine chip component. Independent edge startups struggle: Hailo's valuation dropped from $1.2B to under $500M before Microchip acquired it, and Google Coral's code repo is now archived read-only. Consumer reception is cold—73% of iPhone and 87% of Samsung users see little value in AI features, and Microsoft dropped its NPU-exclusive strategy at Build 2026. The real profits are in industrial settings: Phonak hearing aids run neural denoising locally with a 10dB SNR boost, and Roborock shipped 5.8M units in 2025 with all visual inference on-device. After cloud API prices dropped ~99.7% in three years, edge's cost advantage has narrowed; the remaining hard reasons are latency, offline use, data locality, and compliance.

Why it matters: A sharp piece that dismantles the edge AI narrative by separating it into three distinct businesses. The Hailo valuation collapse from $1.2B to under $500M before acquisition is the best footnote. Not scored higher because it's industry commentary rather than hard news, and so...