A List of Chip/IP for Deep Learning (keep updating)
1. China’s Plan for World Domination in AI Isn’t So Crazy After All
China has vast amounts of data, and big companies, startups, and the government are plowing money into the field. Data is key, and access to it has always been easier in China.
2. Chinese AI chip startup gets $100 million investment:
Chinese chip startup Cambricon has pulled in $100 million in a new investment round from a fund linked to the Chinese government’s State Development and Investment Corp, as well as funding from companies like Alibaba and Lenovo.
3. Researchers built an invisible backdoor to hack AI’s decisions
A team of NYU researchers has discovered a way to manipulate the artificial intelligence that powers self-driving cars and image recognition by installing a secret backdoor into the software. The NYU team says this attack can happen a few ways. Either the cloud provider can sell access to AI, a hacker could gain access to a cloud provider’s server and replace the AI, or the hacker could upload the network as open-source software for others to unwittingly use. Researchers even found that when these neural networks were taught to recognize a different set of images, the trigger was still effective. Beyond fooling a car, the technique could make individuals invisible to AI-powered image detection.
4. The growing Amazon Web Services AI Cloud:
Amazon, which operates the largest cloud computing service in AWS, is beginning to thread machine learning capabilities throughout its many services. The latest Macie, a ML service that trawls through files stored in AWS, using machine learning to look for sensitive data (personally identifiable information, intellectual property, etc) in a semi-supervised way. Seems like RegEx on steroids.
5. An inside look at Ford’s $1 billion bet on Argo AI
Argo AI is a startup that appeared seemingly out of nowhere six months ago, with $1 billion in backing from Ford. Its goal is to deliver the technology for fully autonomous vehicles to Ford by 2021.
6.China’s Bitmain dominates bitcoin mining. Now it wants to cash in on artificial intelligence
Bitmain’s newest product, the Sophon, may or may not take over deep learning. But by giving it such a name Zhan and his Bitmain co-founder, Jihan Wu, have signaled to the world their intentions. The Sophon unit will include Bitmain’s first piece of bespoke silicon for a revolutionary AI technology. If things go to plan, thousands of Bitmain Sophon units soon could be training neural networks in vast data centers around the world.
7. DARPA tunes machine learning to radio signals
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agencies is looking to apply the same kind of machine learning to the radio spectrum as is used by advanced systems for applications ranging from voice recognition to management of internet-of-things devices to autonomous vehicles.
8. Winner-takes all effects in autonomous cars
There are now several dozen companies trying to make the technology for autonomous cars, across OEMs, their traditional suppliers, existing major tech companies and startups. Clearly, not all of these will succeed, but enough of them have a chance that one wonders what and where the winner-take-all effects could be, and what kinds of leverage there might be. Are there network effects that would allow the top one or two companies to squeeze the rest out, as happened in smartphone or PC operating systems? Or might there be room for five or ten companies to compete indefinitely? And for what layers in the stack does victory give power in other layers? Benedict Evans from Andreesen Horowitz takes a hard look at the technology and industry of autonomous cars and who will take control over all the data that will be generated from their consumer adoption. What parts of the stack are most valuable, and where to network effects take place? It's a fascinating analysis