I think this is a miss on what the Pi is: an experiment. Sure, it stood on the shoulders of other SFF boards that came before it - but it broke into the general computing landscape targeting makers and builders. If the AI hat doesn't work out, so be it. The use cases for this type of hat may yet to be seen. On one hand it may feel shortsighted to bringing hardware to market with no explicit use case, but that's part of the Pi brand.

As someone else mentioned: if the hat could efficiently be leveraged with the YOLO models on Frigate for a low volume camera setup that could be a nice niche use case for it.

Either way I hope the RPi org keeps dropping things like this and letting the users sort out the use cases with their dollars.

On device processing for robots and drones