Alibaba unveils Hanguang 800 AI inference chip to speed-up ML tasks

Alibaba Group has introduced its first AI inference chip called'Hanguang 800' which performs machine-learning tasks efficiently and quickly. The neural processing unit is already being used to power features on Alibaba's e-commerce sites, including product search and personalised recommendations. The Hanguang 800 will be made available to Alibaba Cloud customers at a later stage. According to Alibaba, its ecommerce website Taobao previously took an hour to categorise one billion product images that are uploaded to the site each day by merchants and prepare them for search and personalised recommendations. However, with the Hanguang 800, Taobao was able to finish the task in just five minutes.