Intel Looks to a New Chip to Power the Coming Age of AI

Microsoft researchers recently built an artificially intelligent system that seems to recognize conversational speech as effectively as a human. Yes, this research comes with caveats, but it's part of a very real and very rapid leap in artificial intelligence over the past several years, a leap driven by deep neural networks. These sweepingly complex algorithms can teach themselves very particular tasks by analyzing vast amounts of data. Microsoft's system learned to recognize words by looking for patterns in old tech support calls. But it's not just the algorithms that are driving the recent revolution in AI. Microsoft's speech rec system relies on large farms of GPU processors, chips that were originally designed for rendering graphics but have proven remarkably adept at running artificial intelligence models.