A new generation of smartphones and other gadgets could be powered by chips designed to act like your brain. BrainChip recently announced its Akida neural networking processor. The processor uses chips inspired by the spiking nature of the human brain. It's part of a growing effort to commercialize chips based on human neural structures. The new generation of chips could mean "more deep neural network processing capability in the future on portable devices, e.g., smartphones, digital companions, smartwatches, health monitoring, autonomous vehicles and drones," Vishal Saxena, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Delaware told Lifewire in an email interview.

Science-fiction writers once envisioned pocket devices that could make calls using voice and video, search immense databases, and also think. Smartphones made the first few goals reality and some recent apps can do low level thinking for you. Now, MIT researchers have come up with a computer chip that will be able to power a truly mobile AI. The term "neural networks" isn't new to any fans of Star Trek or other science-fiction fare, but now it has also become reality. These networks are "large virtual networks of simple information-processing units, which are loosely modeled on the anatomy of the human brain," according to Larry Hardesty of the MIT News Office.