I spend quite a lot of my time doing due diligence on innovation funding applications. I’ve been doing this for rather longer than is comfortable to contemplate so, over the years, I’ve seen progressive tides of hype wash in, fill a few rock pools, and then wash out again, only to re-emerge a few years later – assuming it had any merit in the first place – in a form that actually works as part of the overall problem-solving ecosystem. That innovation-development-hype-disappointment cycle may actually happen several times before the rest of the innovations needed for an idea to gain market traction catch up. That’s certainly been the case with VR and AR, with IoT and, most of all, with ArtificiaI Intelligence (AI). Continue reading Then a Miracle Occurs: The Hype of AI Pitches
Machine Intelligence
Days of Futures Past
The picture above is ASCI Red, the world’s fastest supercomputer in 1999-2000. It was about the size of a large tennis court, sucked a couple of MW and cost around $55M (it went through various incarnations). And that’s not to mention the staff of acolytes and air-conditioned buildings required to make it work. Its delivered performance was about 2.4 TFlops (Thousand Billion Floating Point Operations per second), with a theoretical maximum of around 3.2TFlops, delivered by an array of nearly 10,000 processors, all chuntering away in parallel.