27/03/2019 The next AI explosion will be defined by the chips we build for it - MIT Technology Review

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JEREMY PORTJE

Intelligent Machines

The next AI explosion will be defined by the chips we build for it

Specialized AI chips are the future, and chipmakers are scrambling to figure out which designs will prevail.

by Karen Hao March 26, 2019

     

ardware design, rather than algorithms, will help us achieve the

H
next big breakthrough in AI. That’s according to Bill Dally, Nvidia’s
chief scientist, who took the stage Tuesday at EmTech Digital, MIT
Technology Review’s AI conference. “Our current revolution in deep
learning has been enabled by hardware,” he said.

As evidence, he pointed to the history of the field: many of the algorithms
we use today have been around since the 1980s, and the breakthrough of
using large quantities of labeled data to train neural networks came during
the early 2000s. But it wasn’t until the early 2010s—when graphics
processing units, or GPUs, entered the picture—that the deep­learning
revolution truly took o .

“We have to continue to provide more capable hardware, or progress in AI
will really slow down,” Dally said.

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27/03/2019 The next AI explosion will be defined by the chips we build for it - MIT Technology Review

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Nvidia is now exploring three main paths forward: developing more
specialized chips; reducing the computation required during deep learning;
and experimenting with analog rather than digital chip architectures.

Nvidia has found that highly specialized chips designed for a specific
computational task can outperform GPU chips that are good at handling
many di erent kinds of computation. The di erence, Dally said, could be as
much as a 20% increase in e ciency for the same level of performance.

Dally also referenced a study that Nvidia did to test the potential of
“pruning”—the idea that you can reduce the number of calculations that
must be performed during training, without sacrificing a deep­learning
model’s accuracy. Researchers at the company found they were able to skip
around 90% of those calculations while retaining the same learning
accuracy. This means the same learning tasks can take place using much
smaller chip architectures.

Finally, Dally mentioned that Nvidia is now experimenting with analog
computation. Computers store almost all information, including numbers,
as a series of 0s or 1s. But analog computation would allow all sorts of values
—such as 0.3 or 0.7—to be encoded directly. That should unlock much more
e cient computation, because numbers can be represented more succinctly,
though Dally said his team currently isn’t sure how analog will fit into the
future of chip design.

Naveen Rao, the corporate vice president and general manager of the AI
Products Group at Intel, also took the stage and likened the importance of
the AI hardware evolution to the role that evolution played in biology. Rats
and humans, he said, are divergent in evolution by a time scale of a few
hundred million years. Despite vastly improved capabilities, however,
humans have the same fundamental computing units as their rodent
counterparts.

The same principle holds true when it comes to chip designs, Rao said. Any
chip—whether specialized or flexible, digital or analog, optical or otherwise
—is simply a substrate for encoding and manipulating information. But
depending on how that substrate is designed, it could be the di erence
between the capabilities of a rat and a human.

Insects, like rats, he said, are also built with the same fundamental units as
humans. But insects have fixed architectures whereas humans have more
flexible ones. Neither one, he argued, is superior to the other, but they
clearly evolved to suit di erent purposes. Insects can likely survive a nuclear
war, while humans have much more sophisticated capabilities.

A i h i i l b li d hi d i A b i
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27/03/2019 The next AI explosion will be defined by the chips we build for it - MIT Technology Review
Again, those principles can be applied to chip design. As we bring more
smart devices online, it won’t always make sense to send their data to the

cloud in order to be processed through a deep­learning model. Instead, it
may make sense to run a small, e cient deep­learning model on the device
itself. This idea, known as “AI on the edge,” could benefit from specialized,
fixed chip architectures that are more e cient. Data centers that power “AI
on the cloud,” on the other hand, would run on fully flexible and
programmable chip architectures, to handle a much broader spectrum of
learning tasks.

Rao noted that whatever chip designs Intel and Nvidia decide to pursue, the
e ect on the evolution of AI will be significant. Throughout history,
individual civilizations evolved in very di erent ways because of the unique
materials at their disposal. Likewise, the operations that Intel and Nvidia
make easier through di erent chip designs will heavily influence the kinds of
learning tasks the AI community will pursue.

“We’re in this rapid Precambrian explosion [for chip architectures] right
now,” Rao said, “and not every solution is going to win.”

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