DARPA Chip Effort Advances AI Hardware

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI) includes development efforts aimed at AI hardware components needed to provide the computational horsepower for accelerating the movement of big data used in emerging machine learning applications. "U.S. leadership in microelectronics is essential to U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence," Gilman Louie, a member of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), told this week's virtual ERI conference. Maintaining the lead in AI hardware requires "technical feats only DARPA would attempt." In a series of reports to Congress, the commission has emphasized continued U.S. leadership in microelectronics as a way to "get AI right," said Louie, founder and former CEO of In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the U.S. intelligence community. NSCAI, which is led by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, was created last year with a three-year mandate to advance AI, machine learning and associated technologies for U.S. national security.