Horizon Robotics Exerts Tight Grip Over Artificial Intelligence Stack

As the race intensifies to run machine learning tasks in embedded devices instead of the cloud, several companies are trying to set themselves up with custom chips to ease the shift. Horizon Robotics is not only tackling chips but also software and the cloud, with an eye toward beating rivals in applications like security cameras and autonomous cars. "The chip is the local brain that directly senses the surrounding environment, while the algorithm is the miner of the data," said Kai Yu, founder and chief executive of Horizon Robotics, and the former head of Baidu's artificial intelligence unit, called the Institute of Deep Learning, in an interview with Electronic Design. "We want to empower end devices with A.I. capacity and make them smart without relying on the cloud alone," Yu said, adding that the "chip and algorithms are used to perceive and filter big data, perform real-time processing and transmit valuable data to the cloud for further mining and modeling. The central component in Horizon Robotics' SoCs is the brain processing unit, a custom block of circuitry that specializes in algorithms trained on vast libraries of images, hundreds of hours of video, or other data.