Tensor Processing Unit (TPU)

Advanced AI requires advanced hardware. What if the global supply of high-end AI chips dries up? Most of the world’s advanced AI processors are manufactured in Taiwan, where tension with mainland China is rising.

The trend toward ever-larger models crossed the threshold from immense to ginormous. Google kicked off 2021 with Switch Transformer, the first published work to exceed a trillion parameters, weighing in at 1.6 trillion.

Google designed its own AI chip for its new smartphone — a snub to Qualcomm, the dominant chip vendor in Android phones. What’s new: Google debuted the Tensor chip last week

A neural network wrote the blueprint for upcoming computer chips that will accelerate deep learning itself. Google engineers used a reinforcement learning system to arrange the billions of minuscule transistors in an upcoming version of its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips.

Chips specially designed for AI are becoming much faster at training neural networks, judging from recent trials. MLPerf, an organization that’s developing standards for hardware performance in machine learning tasks, released results from its third benchmark competition.

A high-profile semiconductor startup made a bid for the future of AI computation. UK startup Graphcore released the Colossus Mk2, a processor intended to perform the matrix math calculations at the heart of deep learning more efficiently than other specialized processors.

Quantum computing has made great strides in recent years, though it still faces significant challenges. If and when it gets here, machine learning may be ready for it.

Billions of dollars invested to create novel AI hardware will bear their early fruit in 2020. Google unleashed a financial avalanche with its tensor processing unit in 2017.