Brain-Like Chips Now Beat the Human Brain in Speed and Efficiency

Neuromorphic computing--the next big thing in artificial intelligence--is on fire. Just last week, two studies individually unveiled computer chips modeled after information processing in the human brain. The first, published in Nature Materials, found a perfect solution to deal with unpredictability at synapses--the gap between two neurons that transmit and store information. The second, published in Science Advances, further amped up the system's computational power, filling synapses with nanoclusters of supermagnetic material to bolster information encoding. Brain-like hardware systems that compute faster--and more efficiently--than the human brain. "Ultimately we want a chip as big as a fingernail to replace one big supercomputer," said Dr. Jeehwan Kim, who led the first study at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.