Most advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have so far been confined to software. Today’s AI computer programmes are vast users of data. They sift through these data and use methods such as pattern recognition. For instance, an online retailer like Amazon looks at your past history of browsing for a particular product online and then “matches” this use pattern to effectively target advertisements to you through sites like Facebook and Google so that you are enticed to buy.
This is simple enough, but a similar method sits behind more advanced uses of AI such as self-driving vehicles. As I have written in this column before, human beings pore over hundreds of thousands of hours of video, labelling every small detail, including road signs, traffic lights, distances from other traffic and so on so that these otherwise random data elements are now labelled accurately for the AI software in self-driving cars to analyze—and then act on.
Some AI is now actually smart enough to write improvements to its own software code as its “understanding” of the data fed to it increases, suggesting that machines can now “think” for themselves. There has been astonishment, as I have written here before, at the discovery that these black-boxes can autonomously develop the capacity to obfuscate the truth.
But all this is still software. The relentless march of Moore’s law: the explosion in computing performance with the attendant reduction in the cost of computing, along with the Internet, which has produced an explosion of data, has allowed the decades-old AI software research ideas of neural networks and machine learning to see the light of day.
It seems that AI is now shifting into the hardware realm, specifically in the development of integrated circuits (ICs). I spoke recently with Nagendra Nagaraja and Prakash Trivedi, two of the founders of a deep technology start-up called AlphaICs, who are trying to revolutionize the design of ICs to meet AI’s future needs. Vinod Dham, the reputed designer of some of Intel Corp.’s breakthrough chips, such as the Intel Pentium, is the third founder.
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