Deep Learning and Neuromorphic Chips

There are three main ingredients to creating artificial intelligence: hardware (compute and memory), software (or algorithms), and data. We've heard a lot of late about deep learning algorithms that are achieving superhuman level performance in various tasks, but what if we changed the hardware? Firstly, we can optimise CPU's which are based on the von Neumann architectures that we have been using since the invention of the computer in the 1940's. These include memory improvements, more processors on a chip (a GPU of the type found in a cell phone, might have almost 200 cores), FPGA's and ASIC's. Such is the case with research being done at MIT and Stanford.