The AI arms race spawns new hardware architectures

As society turns to artificial intelligence to solve problems across ever more domains, we're seeing an arms race to create specialized hardware that can run deep learning models at higher speeds and lower power consumption. Some recent breakthroughs in this race include new chip architectures that perform computations in ways that are fundamentally different from what we've seen before. Looking at their capabilities gives us an idea of the kinds of AI applications we could see emerging over the next couple of years. Neural networks, composed of thousands and millions of small programs that perform simple calculations to perform complicated tasks such as detecting objects in images or converting speech to text are key to deep learning. But traditional computers are not optimized for neural network operations.