A Deep Learning AI Chip for Your Phone

Neural networks learn to recognize objects in images and perform other artificial intelligence tasks with a very low error rate. But they're typically too complex to run on a smartphone, where, you have to admit, they'd be pretty useful. At the IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, MIT engineers presented a chip designed to use run sophisticated image-processing neural network software on a smartphone's power budget. The great performance of neural networks doesn't come free. In image processing, for example, neural networks like AlexNet work so well because they put an image through a huge number of filters, first finding image edges, then identifying objects, then figuring out what's happening in a scene.