Deep Learning Hardware for the Next Big AI Framework

It might be a bit early to call generative adversarial networks (GANs) the next platform for AI frameworks, but there is little doubt we will hear much more about this beefed up approach to deep learning over the next year and beyond. Like so many other areas where GPUs have a play, much of the early production work is being done in graphics--image and video. This certainly means gaming, which is music to Nvidia's ears. But as more research emerges, especially from the edges of medicine, it is becoming clear that GANs might be able to go several steps beyond mere recognition and actually generate examples, learn from those (through AI "arguments" between a generator and discriminator), and produce some surprising results. There is much to be said about GANs from a future applications perspective, but this is one area where even the best general purpose hardware might not be up to the task at any kind of scale.