World's First in AI: IBM Research's 4-Bit Machine Learning

The artificial intelligence (AI) renaissance is largely due to advances in deep learning, a type of machine learning with architectural elements inspired by the biological brain. However, unlike the energy-efficient human brain, the process of training large scale deep neural networks is enormously energy-intensive, requiring colossal amounts of computing memory and power. In a world's first, IBM Research reveals at this week's NeurIPS conference an unprecedented 4-bit AI training system that may help reduce machine learning's heavy carbon footprint. "Training AI models has become extremely expensive and generates a massive carbon footprint. IBM Research over the last five years has introduced a number of key techniques to address these challenges and dramatically improve how we train neural network models," said Kailash Gopalakrishnan, IBM Fellow and Senior Manager, Accelerator Architectures and Machine Learning, IBM Research.