It’s bonanza time in the land of computing, especially if you have bet large on artificial intelligence (AI). Opening his company’s autumn technology conference, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang claimed: “Computing is advancing at incredible speeds. The engine propelling this rocket is accelerated computing, and its fuel is AI.”
Huang has good reason to be optimistic about the future of AI-driven computing. A decade ago, researchers at the Swiss research institute IDSIA took the deep-learning concepts developed by a small group led by Geoffrey Hinton, professor of computer science at the University of Toronto, and found they could use the parallel computing units sitting inside graphics processing units (GPUs) originally developed to run 3D games to speed up the processing. After training the deep neural network on road signs, they found the model could spot such tiny hints in shapes that it could read almost completely bleached surfaces.
Not only did the IDSIA...