I’d like a side of AI chips, please
Or a plate of AI poutine, s’il vous plaît
What is an AI chip? Well, you can’t go to your local chippy to get AI chips…and there is no such thing as AI poutine — even though that’d be awesome.
Or extremely dangerous.
An AI chip is a computer chip designed to accelerate artificial intelligence processes. Alibaba announced its first AI chip on Tuesday. Christened “Huangang 800,” claims are that the chip can cut hour-long computing processes down to five minutes.
Will Alibaba use the Huangang 800 to execute their plan for complete world domination? A company spokesperson told CNBC that it’s planning on utilizing the chips in their cloud computing products. So yes, pretty much.
Let’s delve into the important questions regarding this intelligent, chippy goodness.
What’s been happening with AI chips?
China really seems to be angling for the lead in AI chip development, with a plethora of Chinese companies having already launched or announced their AI chips.
In late August, Huawei commercially launched the catchily-named, “Ascend 910.” Though the original specs weren’t quite met (310W power consumption instead of 350W), it’s still awesome. While the Alibaba chip is strictly an AI inference card, the Ascend 910 can be used for both AI training and inference. Sexy.
There are plenty of companies within the US, however, who have developed (or are developing) their own AI chips including Adapteva, Facebook, AWS, IBM, and Google.
In 2016, Google unveiled their ASIC TPUs (Tensor Processing Unit), chips custom-built for machine learning. They then unveiled the tiny, adorable Edge TPUs in 2018, designed to carry out inference in IoT devices.
And let us not forget Intel, the other who made media waves for their own AI chips in August as well.
They unveiled (there it is again, “unveiled”) two new processors in their Nervana Neural Network Processor (NNP) lineup. These have not been given monikers as glamorous as “Ascend 910.” Poor chips. The NNP-T has been denominated, “Spring Crest,” while the NNP-I is called, “Spring Hill.”
But do you know the third other who made media waves in August for an AI chip? I promise we’ll move on in a mo’.
They’ve got the wafer-scale engine. No, we haven’t suddenly switched to an exposition of a Roald Dahl novel. Known as “WSE,” the chip is supposed to be the largest this world has seen — and in August, it was proclaimed to give the company a “three-year lead” in the AI chip space.
You can learn more about them here.
Prime Shoutout Spot Goes to Kumar and His Article in CPO Magazine on AI and Cybersecurity:
What’s next with AI chips and such?
If we’re lucky, there will be an AI poutine revolution.
But let’s delve into proper projections. Because if you’ve made it this far you’re probably interested in things predictive. In 2018, the international AI chip market was valued at $6,638 million. What is the projected value of the international AI chip market in 2025? $91,185 million.
Money, money, and more money. That’s what’s next with AI chips. But also…
Huawei announced plans in October 2018 for a full-stack portfolio of AI products including more chips, cloud services, and other products. The first of which to be commercially available besides the Ascend 910 will be MindSpore, an AI computing framework. Several other companies will be rolling out full-stack portfolios of AI chips and related products as well.
The point is that the whole world will be running on AI chips relatively soon.
If you’re ready to live in a world thoroughly permeated by AI, check out my Becoming Human article on dating robots.
If you’re not, then check out Survival Magazine cause you’re gonna have to go off-the-grid and homestead.
