AI Chips Going Mainstream

Baidu, China’s leading search engine, and Intel are partnering to make AI chips: “Intel said it’s collaborating with Chinese search company Baidu to develop a specialized computer chip to speed the process of training deep-learning systems”, Fortune reports.

Today at the Baidu Create AI developer conference in Beijing, Intel Corporate Vice President Naveen Rao announced that Baidu* is collaborating with Intel on development of the new Intel® Nervana™ Neural Network Processor for Training (NNP-T). The collaboration involves the hardware and software designs of the new custom accelerator with one purpose – training deep learning models at lightning speed.

“The next few years will see an explosion in the complexity of AI models and the need for massive deep learning compute at scale. Intel and Baidu are focusing their decade-long collaboration on building radical new hardware, co-designed with enabling software, that will evolve with this new reality – something we call ‘AI 2.0.’”
–Naveen Rao, Intel corporate vice president and general manager of the AI Products Group

Few months ago, Intel also announced that it was working with  “Facebook to develop a computer chip to aid with A.I. inference, which happens when an A.I. system acts on the data it ingests”. A specific brand of electrical engineering called Neuromorphics is going mainstream right now with these AI chips.

Neuromorphic systems are inspired by the structure, function and plasticity of biological nervous systems. They are artificial neural systems that mimic algorithmic behavior of the biological animal systems through efficient adaptive and intelligent control techniques. They are designed to adapt, learn from their environments, and make decisions like biological systems and not to perform better than them. There are no efforts to eliminate deficiencies inherent in biological systems.

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