Powering artificial intelligence: The explosion of new AI hardware accelerators

AI's rapid evolution is producing an explosion in new types of hardware accelerators for machine learning and deep learning. Some people refer to this as a "Cambrian explosion," which is an apt metaphor for the current period of fervent innovation. It refers to the period about 500 million years ago when essentially every biological "body plan" among multicellular animals appeared for the first time. From that point onward, these creatures--ourselves included--fanned out to occupy, exploit, and thoroughly transform every ecological niche on the planet. The range of innovative AI hardware-accelerator architectures continues to expand.