You May Already Be Using Google's AI Chips and Not Know It

Last month Google revealed that it's making its own custom artificial intelligence processing chips. Now it turns out that you may already be using them. The chips are called TPUs, short for Tensor Processing Unit, named for Google's open source AI framework, TensorFlow. Today at the 2016 WIRED Business Conference in New York City, the head of Google's cloud business, Diane Greene, said that Google is already using TPUs in more than 100 projects. These include Android's voice recognition system, the "Smart Reply" feature of its Inbox app, and Google's new cross-application search service Springboard--in short, stuff you may already be using.