Powering the Brains of Tomorrow’s Intelligent Machines
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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