Startup Schools Machine Learning EE Times

A new startup debuted software that it claims will disrupt the emerging field of machine learning. Gamalon uses complex math and algorithms instead of the high-end processors required for the deep-learning techniques becoming popular with the likes of Facebook and Google. "This is a big breakthrough and will be a sea change in artificial intelligence," said Ben Vigoda, who sold Lyric Semiconductor to Analog Devices in 2011. The startup came out of stealth mode the same day a rival, GraphCore, revealed some details about the software behind its AI processor which is tailored to the current deep-learning techniques (see page 3 for more). Today's neural network approaches require training with the huge data sets typically only web giants possess. The job takes so much processing power that Google created its own accelerator, Facebook designed an open-source GPU server, and Intel acquired two chip startups to handle it.