China wants to make the chips that will add AI to any gadget

In an office at Tsinghua University in Beijing, a computer chip is crunching data from a nearby camera, looking for faces stored in a database. Seconds later, the same chip, called Thinker, is handling voice commands in Chinese. Thinker is designed to support neural networks. But what's special is how little energy it uses--just eight AA batteries are enough to power it for a year. Thinker can dynamically tailor its computing and memory requirements to meet the needs of the software being run.