Movidius packs plug-and-play AI into a USB stick

If you're looking to add artificial intelligence to a hardware project for doing things like sensing objects in an enviroment or understand voice commands, Movidius' new Fathom USB stick might be just the thing. The company is known for its Myriad 2 deep learning chip that allows DJI drones to avoid obstacles. The Fathom is essentially a portable version of the chip that can be plugged into the USB 3.0 port of Linux-based devices to run fully-trained neural networks while consuming very little power. Some of the biggest names in tech are coming to TNW Conference in Amsterdam this May. It's compatible with Caffe and TensorFlow frameworks and is capable of 150 gigaFLOPS (150 billion floating-operations per second). That means developers can use it to do things like enable robots to understand natural human speech and recognize faces, and teach drones to navigate indoors and outdoors by themselves – all without the need to connect to the cloud.