Neuromorphic Chips: a Path Towards Human-level AI

Recently we have seen a slew of popular films that deal with artificial intelligence – most notably The Imitation Game, Chappie, Ex Machina, and Her. However, despite over five decades of research into artificial intelligence, there remain many tasks which are simple for humans that computers cannot do. Given the slow progress of AI, for many the prospect of computers with human-level intelligence seems further away today than it did when Isaac Asimov's classic I, Robot was published in 1950. The fact is, however, that today the development of neuromorphic chips offers a plausible path to realizing human-level artificial intelligence within the next few decades. Starting in the early 2000's there was a realization that neural network models – based on how the human brain works – could solve many tasks that could not be solved by other methods. The buzzphrase'deep learning' has become a catch-all term for neural network models and related techniques, as is shown by a plotting of the frequency of the phrase using Google Trends: Most deep learning practitioners acknowledge that the recent popularity of'deep learning' is driven by hardware, in particular GPUs .