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Intel Starts R&D Effort in Probabilistic Computing for AI

Intel announced today that it is forming a strategic research alliance to take artificial intelligence to the next level. Autonomous systems don't have good enough ways to respond to the uncertainties of the real world, and they don't have a good enough way to understand how the uncertainties of their sensors should factor into the decisions they need to make. According to Intel CTO Mike Mayberry the answer is "probabilistic computing", which he says could be AI's next wave.

IEEE Spectrum: What motivated this new research thrust?

Mike Mayberry: We're trying to figure out what the next wave of AI is. The original wave of AI is based on logic and it's based on writing down rules; it's closest to what you'd call classical reasoning. The current wave of AI is around sensing and perception—using a convolutional neural net to scan an image and see if something of interest is there. Those two by themselves don't add up to all the things that human beings do naturally as they navigate the world.

[...] So we've been doing a certain amount of internal work and with academia, and we've decided that there's enough here that we're going to kick off a research community. The goal is to have people share what they know about it, collaborate on it, figure out how you represent probability when you write software, and how you construct computer hardware. We think this will be ... part of the third wave of AI. We don't think we're done there, we think there are other things as well, but this will be around probabilistic computing.

Intel embraces defective computing.

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