A new AI chip can perform image recognition tasks in nanoseconds

The news: A new type of artificial eye, made by combining light-sensing electronics with a neural network on a single tiny chip, can make sense of what it's seeing in just a few nanoseconds, far faster than existing image sensors. Why it matters: Computer vision is integral to many applications of AI--from driverless cars to industrial robots to smart sensors that act as our eyes in remote locations--and machines have become very good at responding to what they see. But most image recognition needs a lot of computing power to work. Part of the problem is a bottleneck at the heart of traditional sensors, which capture a huge amount of visual data, regardless of whether or not it is useful for classifying an image. Crunching all that data slows things down.