Share: Google Has Speedy New AI Chip ‘It Doesn’t Really Want To Talk About’, Also Mossberg Reax

By | May 20, 2016
 

Interesting way to test AIs at Google, not exactly a Turing test.

Google yesterday confirmed rumors that it has been working on a custom chip designed to speed up computing related to its artificial intelligence efforts.

The result, it said at its I/O developer conference, is a chip it calls a Tensor Processing Unit. It’s designed to work with TensorFlow, an open source software library for developing AI applications.

The TPU chips, Google says, are designed to be built into its existing computing infrastructure and are already in use boosting the performance of services like Street View and voice recognition. They also played a part in Google’s AlphaGo software that defeated the human champion at the board game Go.

Full version: http://www.recode.net/2016/5/19/11713432/google-has-a-speedy-new-ai-chip-it-doesnt-really-want-to-talk-about

Mossberg: Google doubles down on AI

But the biggest theme stressed by Google CEO Sundar Pichai and his lieutenants, over and over again throughout the two-hour keynote, was that Google is doubling down on artificial intelligence as the next great phase of computing. And they believe Google can do it better than anyone else.

[Apple] has limited itself to working with local info on the phone itself, while Google can use all that data it has scooped up from search and other cloud services.

But the big takeaway from I/O for me was that Google has laid down a huge bet on computers getting more and more human. It’ll be fascinating to see if that bet pays off, how competitors respond and what the consequences are for society.

Full version: http://www.recode.net/2016/5/19/11711126/mossberg-google-ai