Could a strange new memory chip unlock mysteries of AI? ZDNet

Modern artificial intelligence lacks a strong theoretical basis, and so it's often a shrug of the shoulders why it works at all (or, oftentimes, doesn't entirely work). One of the deepest mysteries of deep learning is one of its most brilliant successes, what's known as stochastic gradient descent. Stochasticity, the process of randomly picking out examples of data, has yielded breakthroughs in image recognition and other deep learning tasks. And now, one computer chip company thinks they may have a kind of machine for stochasticity, a chip whose power comes from randomness. It might not lead to a theory of why machine learning works, but it might lead to knew breakthroughs in what stochasticity can achieve.