How Smart Are AI Chips Really? We Know They Are A Marketing Goldmine But Hackaday Breaks One Down To Find Out

The best part about the term “Artificial Intelligence” is that nobody can really tell you what it exactly means. The main reason for this stems from the term “intelligence”, with definitions ranging from the ability to practice logical reasoning to the ability to perform cognitive tasks or dream up symphonies. When it comes to human intelligence, properties such as self-awareness, complex cognitive feats, and the ability to plan and motivate oneself are generally considered to be defining features. But frankly, what is and isn’t “intelligence” is open to debate.

What isn’t open to debate is that AI is a marketing goldmine. The vagueness has allowed for marketing departments around the world to go all AI-happy, declaring that their product is AI-enabled and insisting that their speech assistant responds ‘intelligently’ to one’s queries. One might begin to believe that we’re on the cusp of a fantastic future inhabited by androids and strong AIs attending to our every whim.

The detail is interesting for the analysis of the Kendryte K210 System-on-Chip but not at all surprising… the K210 is essentially a vector processor. It’s optimized for the particular math of taking convolutions and building weighted sums. And it does this very fast. It’s like a GPU without the graphics hardware. Taken further, it’s not doing anything a general-purpose chip cannot do it’s just optimised to do it a lot more quickly on the hardware itself. It’s like a GPU is today, compared to the older CPU which used to also generate the graphics display in years gone by.

Years ago radio also appeared to be magic until we all understood the technology behind it…

See https://hackaday.com/2019/11/04/how-smart-are-ai-chips-really/

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The best part about the term “Artificial Intelligence” is that nobody can really tell you what it exactly means. The main reason for this stems from the term “intelligence”,…