Bringing Big Neural Networks to Self-Driving Cars, Smartphones, and Drones

Artificial intelligence systems based on neural networks have had quite a string of recent successes: One beat human masters at the game of Go, another made up beer reviews, and another made psychedelic art. But taking these supremely complex and power-hungry systems out into the real world and installing them in portable devices is no easy feat. This February, however, at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, teams from MIT, Nvidia, and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) brought that goal closer. They showed off prototypes of low-power chips that are designed to run artificial neural networks that could, among other things, give smartphones a bit of a clue about what they are seeing and allow self-driving cars to predict pedestrians' movements. Until now, neural networks--learning systems that operate analogously to networks of connected brain cells--have been much too energy intensive to run on the mobile devices that would most benefit from artificial intelligence, like smartphones, small robots, and drones.