Lōʻihi and the 3rd World
Lōʻihi Seamount is an active submarine volcano about 35 km off the southeast coast of the island of Hawaiʻi. i, Lo’ihi is the only volcano in the Hawaiian seamount that is in the earliest stages of development. These submarine volcanoes go through cycles of eruption, lava buildup, and erosion for millions of years to form islands. It’s also the name of Intel’s newest Neuromorphic chip, both are dangerous, new and most importantly have the capacity to change everything.
Loihi, is Intel’s new neuromorphic AI chip, the chip’s design is based on the world’s greatest super computer — the human brain — and like the human mind, Loihi learns from data collected from the world around it. The chip learns, makes inferences, and improves its intelligence over the time all on it’s own. This hypothetical leap in computing is achieved by changing the fundamental nature of chip design, Intel has thrown out the logic gates and opted for the riskier and more innovative asynchronous spiking to take inferences from its environment and become constantly smarter. With A total of 130,000 neurons and 130 million synapses, this is by far Intel’s most ambitious journey into the world of AI and Machine Learning to date the company has stated the chip has been tested with several algorithms with high algorithmic efficiency for problems including path planning, constraint satisfaction, sparse coding, dictionary learning, and dynamic pattern learning and adaptation.
What’s Asynchronoous Spiking and why does it matter
Most traditional chips use logic gates — the foundation of most digital circuits — with two inputs and one output. At any given moment, every terminal is in one of the two binary conditions low (0) or high (1). Spiking Neurons are different, instead of working on binary logic they pass along signals of varying strength, much like the neurons in our own brains, they can also fire when needed, rather than being controlled by a clock like a regular processor.
This isn’t the first neuromorphic chip ever produced, the gang at IBM did something similar with True North many years ago, the difference between True North and Loihi is that the former could not perform training only inference, it can only evaluate pre-trained neural nets.
Loihi unlike it’s predecessor can deliver on chip training along with good performance and incredible efficiency, Intel claims that it’s up to 1,000 times more energy-efficient than general purpose computing required for typical training systems.
Loihi’s real importance lies in the nature of neural networks and the fact that neural networks do not require the same architecture as classical computing. Neural networks are quite simple (not really) they are little matrix multiplications and non-linearities, you can directly build silicon to do that. You can build silicon that is very faithful to the architecture of neural networks, which GPUs are not.
But outside of all the cool jargon and dystopic imagery what does Loihi actually mean? It’s to early to tell — chips will only ship in Q2 2018. However, we can create a number of possible scenarios from it’s core architecture. Because Loihi can learn from it’s surrounding environment it means that applications like stoplights that automatically adjust to the flow of traffic and irrigation systems that can learn the optimal amount of water a specific plant would need.
It means we can venture into a field of computing that isn’t stuck in a draconian serf like relationship with cloud computing, and as an African it means that we may one day be able to deploy robots and tools into environments that don’t have good cellular or fibre coverage. The pacemaker installed in a octogenarian in rural Burkina Faso can learn to spot anomalies in heart beats and adjust accordingly without outside interventions.
This is not to say this is a guarantee or even remotely possible, it’s rather a speculation on a minor advance in technology that once it has come to fruition will result in services reserved for the ultra-wealthy becoming ubiquitous in the developed and undeveloped world.
