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Powering the Brains of Tomorrow’s Intelligent Machines

posted by Fnord666 on Friday July 26 2019, @01:47PM   
from the a-flop-by-any-other-name... dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Sense and compute are the electronic eyes and ears that will be the ultimate power behind automating menial work and encouraging humans to cultivate their creativity.

These new capabilities for machines will depend on the best and brightest talent, and investors who are building and financing companies aiming to deliver the AI chips destined to be the neurons and synapses of robotic brains.

Like any other Herculean task, this one is expected to come with big rewards. And it will bring with it big promises, outrageous claims and suspect results. Right now, it's still the Wild West when it comes to measuring AI chips up against each other.

[...] A metric that gets thrown around frequently is TOPS, or trillions of operations per second, to measure performance. TOPS/W, or trillions of operations per second per Watt, is used to measure energy efficiency. These metrics are as ambiguous as they sound.

What are the operations being performed on? What's an operation? Under what circumstances are these operations being performed? How does the timing by which you schedule these operations impact the function you are trying to perform? Is your chip equipped with the expensive memory it needs to maintain performance when running "real-world" models? Phrased differently, do these chips actually deliver these performance numbers in the intended application?

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/19/powering-the-brains-of-tomorrows-intelligent-machines/

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Original Submission

• Really? Really? (Score: 3, Insightful) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday July 26 2019, @03:22PM (1 child)

  by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Friday July 26 2019, @03:22PM (#871504) Journal

  TFA:

  What are the operations being performed on? What's an operation? Under what circumstances are these operations being performed? How does the timing....

  Wikipedia on Operation

  Types of operation
  A binary operation takes two arguments x {\displaystyle x} x and y {\displaystyle y} y and returns the result x ∘ y {\displaystyle x\circ y} {\displaystyle x\circ y}

  There are two common types of operations: unary and binary. Unary operations involve only one value, such as negation and trigonometric functions. Binary operations, on the other hand, take two values, and include addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and exponentiation.

  Operations can involve mathematical objects other than numbers. The logical values true and false can be combined using logic operations, such as and, or, and not. Vectors can be added and subtracted. Rotations can be combined using the function composition operation, performing the first rotation and then the second. Operations on sets include the binary operations union and intersection and the unary operation of complementation. Operations on functions include composition and convolution.

  Operations may not be defined for every possible value. For example, in the real numbers one cannot divide by zero or take square roots of negative numbers. The values for which an operation is defined form a set called its domain. The set which contains the values produced is called the codomain, but the set of actual values attained by the operation is its range. For example, in the real numbers, the squaring operation only produces non-negative numbers; the codomain is the set of real numbers, but the range is the non-negative numbers.

  Operations can involve dissimilar objects. A vector can be multiplied by a scalar to form another vector. And the inner product operation on two vectors produces a scalar. An operation may or may not have certain properties, for example it may be associative, commutative, anticommutative, idempotent, and so on.

  The values combined are called operands, arguments, or inputs, and the value produced is called the value, result, or output. Operations can have fewer or more than two inputs.

  An operation is like an operator, but the point of view is different. For instance, one often speaks of "the operation of addition" or "addition operation" when focusing on the operands and result, but one says "addition operator" (rarely "operator of addition") when focusing on the process, or from the more abstract viewpoint, the function + : S × S → S.

  By the time TFA got to the fourth question and beyond I completely lost interest because the first questions are answered in Computer Science 101 and thus the author should learn to write about the discipline before hitting the keyboard, even though I can readily see the latter questions have real-world applications somewhat (although I always thought it would generally be assumed that operations would be tailored to application I suppose one can question whether the architecture supports the application).

  Though I'm ready to be wrong about it I end with the sage words of Johnny Five:

  Is wrong. Incorrect. Newton Crosby, PhD, not know this?

  I guess that's what you get when the article is simply an advertisement for the firm that the author discloses they are investors in....

  --
  This sig for rent.

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		+1
  Insightful=1, Total=1
  Extra 'Insightful' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		3

• Re:Really? (Score: 3, Insightful) by Rupert Pupnick on Friday July 26 2019, @05:48PM

  by Rupert Pupnick (7277) on Friday July 26 2019, @05:48PM (#871560) Journal

  I couldn’t get much past the grandiose opening sentences, so didn’t RTFA.

  Parent