They probably weren’t inspired by [Jeff Dunham’s] jalapeno on a stick, but Intel have created the Movidius neural compute stick which is in effect a neural network in a USB stick form factor. They don’t rely on the cloud, they require no fan, and you can get one for well under $100.
What distinguishes AI systems on a chip from traditional mobile processors is that they come with specialized neural-network processors, such as graphics processing units or GPUs, tensor processing units or TPUs, and field programming gate arrays or FPGAs. These AI-optimized chips offload neural-network processing from the device’s central processing unit chip, enabling more local autonomous AI processing
Are we about to see another computing revolution and what will the technological and sociopolitical landscape look like after this?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday April 29 2018, @02:24PM (2 children)
We're getting to a point where all new smartphone SoCs will include dedicated machine learning/neural network hardware:
Apple Wants to Add Machine Learning Chips to Smartphone SoCs [soylentnews.org]
The AI hardware doesn't necessarily need a plethora of third-party killer apps to become useful. For example, Google's Pixel 2 smartphone includes the "Pixel Visual Core" [engadget.com] to assist the camera. The amount of people with this hardware will rise even before third-party developers do anything useful with it [techcrunch.com].
Netflix, Amazon, and Google have all been returning irrelevant results/recommendations for many years, coloring your perception of what's possible. That's not to say that Netflix recommendations will become perfect one day, but they are probably not crunching your view history to the extent that they could be. And if storage (personal data + habits) and ML processing power increase by an order of magnitude, that could allow another percent or two of "correctness" to be squeezed out of these models. This will tide people over until brain-computer interfaces gain traction.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Sunday April 29 2018, @02:30PM (1 child)
A percent or two? Sure, probably more than that. But we have a massive hype machine grinding away telling us that the magic AI can anticipate our every desire before we desire it. This is marketing. Current systems are nowhere near as good as they act like they are, and the performance of future systems is hypothetical and subject to diminishing returns as it gets harder to get more training data, you approach the best possible confidence based on signal/noise ratio, etc.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday April 29 2018, @02:45PM
They can do pretty interesting things [youtube.com]. Get used to hype, every new thing gets hyped.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]