Fresh AI Inference Tests Show How Powerful the Technology is Getting

"If all 7.7 billion people on Earth uploaded a single photo, you could classify [them all] in under 2.5 hours for less than $600" Google and Nvidia have both declared victory for their hardware in a fresh round of "MLPerf" AI inference benchmarking tests: Google for its custom Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) silicon, and Nvidia for its Turing GPUs. As always with the MLPerf results it's challenging to declare an overall AI leader without comparing apples with oranges: Alibaba Cloud also performed blisteringly strongly in offline image classification. The MLPerf Inference v0.5 tests were released Wednesday, and capture some of the impressive performance taking place in AI/machine learning, both at the hardware and software level. These performance improvements are rapidly filtering down to the enterprise level: as sophisticated customer service chatbots, models to predict investment outcomes, to underpin nuclear safety, or discover new cures for disease. The MLPerf tests are designed to make it easier for companies to determine the right systems for them, as machine learning silicon, software frameworks and libraries proliferate.