AI cloud

As much as anything sheer coincidence that massively parallel hardware intended for graphics texture mapping and convolutions happens to be almost exactly what the deep neural net AI codes need to be super fast.

This has some PR fluff in as well but isn't a bad introduction:

Same as most of the modern chess engines using AI - they offload the deep AI neural net onto the graphics subsystem to take advantage of its massively parallel hardware. Scientific computing has been doing it for much longer than AI with specialised libraries and some pain and suffering. It works best on certain types of replicated code.

I'm not directly involved in the AI side, but some of the toolchain I use is intended to facilitate that sort of stuff. Annoying side effect is that some related compiler tools will refuse to install if your graphics card isn't sufficiently powerful!

What is AI anyhow? I read about somebody raising $20 million and hiring some programmers to start an AI company. What does that even mean? Is there some theoretical basis for the current AI boom, or do people just use the term for writing a bunch of code?

Neural Network theory, the cartoon version of a real brain, has been around for over a century.

The most recent AI buzz was about the Alpha Fold program for predicting protein structure from the protein amino acid sequence.

But getting the neural networks (or whatever they use) big enough to be useful seems to be the real trick.

The code is mostly already written and the skill is in training it to do something useful in the real world. Googles AlphaGo Zero learnt the game from just the basic rules to global supremacy in about 3 days. It also surpassed the best humans in that timescale and the previous computer record holder. It found new defensive patterns that had never arisen in human play in a couple of millennia. That is non-trivial.

It is a pretty good model for the way the brain works. The only snag is modifying the huge number of interconnections and nodes needed.

It comes and goes in waves. First proposed in 1944 by Warren McCullough and Walter Pitts at MIT

When I was in Japan it was in vogue as "Fuzzy Logic" which covered a multitude of sins but meant that Shinkansen trains always stopped with their doors exactly in front of marked passenger queues every time!

The VC industry is built on home runs, not singles and stolen bases. They're betting/hoping that another Facebook will pop up. That pays for the strikeouts.

(almost) true, which means much of the hype is just hype.

What happened is that processors got faster, storage got cheaper, and fiber optics was laid everywhere. These factors combined to enable the training of big neural nets.

By the way, the same could be said of Fazebook. Those same

Everybody makes a big splash about the coders, but it was the hardware, the plumbing, which created Fazebook. There were similar attempts before 2000, but graphics and communications were too slow, so they fizzled.

Let's see... GPU is designed for graphics, i.e. rotations and scaling, which uses lots of matrix computations. And it so happens that neural net training requires much the same.

AI developers transfer their datasets to Corewave, and rent time on their processors, which run 10x faster than Dell. Sounds like the old IBM mainframe days... they were called ''jobs"

As an aside, the quantum computer developers are planning the same business model.

Explicate?