Google Hopes This New Technology Will Make Artificial Intelligence Smarter

Google believes that the best way to improve artificial intelligence is new hardware technology. The search giant debuted a new microchip on Wednesday tailored for certain types of artificial intelligence projects that require crunching enormous amounts of data. Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the new chip during the annual Google I/O conference for developers in Mountain View, Calif. The so-called Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, is the latest version of a similar chip Google (goog) announced at last year's Google I/O event. Google does not plan to manufacture and sell the chip like Intel (intc) or AMD (amd), but instead will let companies rent access to the chip via Google's cloud computing service.