MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Aug. 8, 2021 -- As machine learning models continue to grow in size and complexity, and more and more models enter production in enterprises worldwide, the acceleration of these workloads is becoming more complex and compute-intensive. At the front end, data-centricity is taking precedence over model-centricity, while at the back end, AI practitioners increasingly want systems that are performant and efficient, but also sustainable, explainable and accountable. From massive research models like GPT-3, to day-to-day models deployed by enterprises around the world, the AI Hardware Summit will bring together people focused on making AI fast, efficient, and affordable. In previous years the AI Hardware Summit has been the site for announcements and product reveals from the likes of Habana Labs, Graphcore, Intel, Qualcomm and many others. As the nexus of the AI acceleration community, the summit has also helped ground-breaking hardware reach people who are using AI to change the world.

Today, we are bombarded by messages about the ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) is changing our world and its future promises and perils. But today's AI, called machine learning, is very different from much of AI in the past. From the 1970s until the 1990s, a very different approach, called "expert systems," appeared poised to radically change society in many of the same ways that today's machine learning seems. Expert systems seek to encode into software systems the experience and understanding of the finest human specialists in everything from diagnosing an infectious disease to identifying the sonar fingerprint of enemy submarines, and then have these systems suggest reasoned decisions and conclusions in new, real-world cases. Today, many of these expert systems are commonplace in everything from systems for maintenance and repair, to automated customer support systems of various sorts.

Dag Spicer is expecting a special package soon, but it's not a Black Friday impulse buy. The fist-sized motor, greened by corrosion, is from a historic room-sized computer intended to ape the human brain. It may also point toward artificial intelligence's future. Spicer is senior curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The motor in the mail is from the Mark 1 Perceptron, built by Cornell researcher Frank Rosenblatt in 1958.

Google self-driving cars are shown outside the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., in May 2014. Google self-driving cars are shown outside the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., in May 2014. An accident last month in Tempe, Ariz., involving a self-driving Uber car highlighted some novel new issues regarding fault and liability that experts say will come up more often as autonomous vehicles hit the road. And that will having an increasing impact on an insurance industry that so far has no road map for how to deal with the new technologies. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett, whose company, Berkshire Hathaway, owns the insurance giant Geico, told CNBC in a February interview: "If the day comes when a significant portion of the cars on the road are autonomous, it will hurt Geico's business very significantly." That would seem to make sense.

Why: If you've ever wondered if, how or why the computer has changed the face of civilization, this place will set you straight. It'll also make clear the role of California, specifically Silicon Valley, in the revolution. What: The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, opened since 1996, has a staggering collection of hardware. But what really makes the place valuable is the wide perspective and clear explanations it gives, so that somebody who has never written code can still grasp the broad outlines of computing history, from the abacus to the punch card (which computers once relied upon) to the silicon chip and the smartphone. Along the way, you get insights into not only familiar characters such as Bill Gates (who started programming computers at 13) and Steve Jobs (who sold his VW van to fund one of his first ventures), but unfamiliar ones such as Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace (who sparred over proto-computer designs designs in the 1830s).

A group of Silicon Valley roboticists who developed Shakey, a pioneer mobile robot project, gathered last night at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., to dedicate the tall, wheeled machine as an IEEE Milestone. Joining the group were other robotics visionaries, IEEE officers and local IEEE section members, and fans of computing history. Shakey, developed at SRI International between 1966 and 1972, was honored as the world's first mobile, intelligent robot. "Stanford Research Institute's Artificial Intelligence Center developed the world's first mobile, intelligent robot, SHAKEY. It could perceive its surroundings, infer implicit facts from explicit ones, create plans, recover from errors in plan execution, and communicate using ordinary English. SHAKEY's software architecture, computer vision, and methods for navigation and planning proved seminal in robotics and in the design of web servers, automobiles, factories, video games, and Mars rovers."

Mountain View, California (CNN) -- The world has mostly caught on to Steve Wozniak's vision of having a computer in every home. But this digital lifestyle can sometimes turn rotten, he said last week. Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs and designed, programmed and built some of the world's first personal computers, laments the byproducts of a culture that's always connected to electronics. Leading a tour through an exhibit of computer artifacts -- including giant supercomputers and Atari game systems -- that opens next month at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Wozniak paused to criticize the stranglehold technology has on our lives. "We're dependent on it," he said at the museum, which holds one of the world's largest collections of vintage computers and sits about six blocks from Google's headquarters.

It is important to divide the overall understanding process into manageable pieces.