Analog A.I.? It sounds crazy, but it might be the future

The future of A.I. is … analog? At least, that's the assertion of Mythic, an A.I. chip company that, in its own words, is taking "a leap forward in performance in power" by going back in time. Before ENIAC, the world's first room-sized programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, buzzed to life in 1945, arguably all computers were analog -- and had been for as long as computers have been around. Analog computers are a bit like stereo amps, using variable range as a way of representing desired values. In an analog computer, numbers are represented by way of currents or voltages, instead of the zeroes and ones that are used in a digital computer.