The future of AI is a software story, says Graphcore's CEO

"We're probably still at the stage of Pac Man, we haven't yet gotten to three-dimensional games," as far as AI's evolution, says Graphcore CEO Nigel Toon. "The misconception here is that this is as much, if not more, a software problem to solve than it is a hardware problem," said Nigel Toon, chief executive officer of AI computer startup Graphcore. Graphcore is known for making a computer system that has hundreds of thousands of processor cores inside every "intelligence processing unit," or IPU, chip, to crunch artificial intelligence problems. Its latest machines have an IPU chip, "Bow," that consists of two semiconductor die stacked one on top of the other. And yet, Toon, who was in town last week from Graphcore's headquarters in Bristol, England, told ZDNet that software is at the heart of the very large challenge of increasingly large AI problems, whereas the hardware, though by no means trivial, is, in a sense, secondary.