MIT researchers invent chip that enables mobile devices to run powerful artificial intelligence algorithms

At the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco this week, MIT researchers presented a new chip designed specifically to implement neural networks. It is 10 times as efficient as a mobile GPU, so it could enable mobile devices to run powerful artificial-intelligence algorithms locally, rather than uploading data to the Internet for processing. Neural nets were widely studied in the early days of artificial-intelligence research, but by the 1970s, they'd fallen out of favor. In the past decade, however, they've enjoyed a revival, under the name "deep learning." "Deep learning is useful for many applications, such as object recognition, speech, face detection," says Vivienne Sze, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at MIT whose group developed the new chip.