IBM's 8-bit AI training technique is up to 4 times faster while retaining accuracy

Computational efficiency is the name of the game in artificial intelligence (AI). It's not easy maintaining a balance between training speed, accuracy, and energy consumption, but recent hardware advances have made the goal more attainable than it once was. The first of the Armonk, New York company's breakthroughs is an accelerated digital technique that achieves full accuracy with 8-bit precision. The second is an 8-bit precision technique for an analog chip -- the highest of its kind to date, IBM claims -- that roughly doubles accuracy. Both were detailed today in Montreal at NeurIPS 2018, one of the world's largest AI and machine learning conferences.