MIT's Tiny New Brain Chip Aims for AI in Your Pocket

The human brain operates on roughly 20 watts of power (a third of a 60-watt light bulb) in a space the size of, well, a human head. The biggest machine learning algorithms use closer to a nuclear power plant's worth of electricity and racks of chips to learn. That's not to slander machine learning, but nature may have a tip or two to improve the situation. By mimicking the brain, super-efficient neuromorphic chips aim to take AI off the cloud and put it in your pocket. The latest such chip is smaller than a piece of confetti and has tens of thousands of artificial synapses made out of memristors--chip components that can mimic their natural counterparts in the brain.