It's our first complete system-on-chip designed to run and train deep learning models faster and more efficiently than a general-purpose CPU. A decade ago, modern AI was born. A team of academic researchers showed that with millions of photos and days of brute force computation, a deep learning model could be trained to identify objects and animals in entirely new images. Today, deep learning has evolved from classifying pictures of cats and dogs to translating languages, detecting tumors in medical scans, and performing thousands of other time-saving tasks. AI models are growing exponentially, but the hardware to train these behemoths and run them on servers in the cloud or on edge devices like smartphones and sensors hasn't advanced as quickly.

A decade ago, modern AI was born. A team of academic researchers showed that with millions of photos and days of brute force computation, a deep learning model could be trained to identify objects and animals in entirely new images. Today, deep learning has evolved from classifying pictures of cats and dogs to translating languages, detecting tumors in medical scans, and performing thousands of other time-saving tasks. AI models are growing exponentially, but the hardware to train these behemoths and run them on servers in the cloud or on edge devices like smartphones and sensors hasn't advanced as quickly. That's why the IBM Research AI Hardware Center decided to create a specialized computer chip for AI.