Machine intelligence is a unique computational workload with distinctly different characteristics to HPC algorithms or graphics programs. With the slowing down of Moore's Law and model sizes on the rise, there is a need for specialised machine learning hardware designed to run AI workloads efficiently. Phil Brown, Graphcore's Director of Applications, recently spoke to Founder of Weights & Biases, Lukas Biewald, about the role of AI processors such as the IPU in driving forward progress in machine intelligence, from enabling sparsity to accelerating BERT. Pursuing new approaches to machine learning can be a challenge, particularly once AI workloads move from pilot to production. At scale, even a slight drop in performance can be costly.