Are you an AI expert, or are you planning to be? There are three fundamental challenges that will underlie the major AI evolutions over the next decade. These are the three areas where you NEED to understand the fundamentals – before AI moves so fast that you’ll never catch up. Let them guide your deep study for the year ahead. Check them out in this new YouTube post: Live free or die, my friend – AJ Maren Live free or…
The Next Big Step: We know there’s got to be something. Right now, deep learning systems are like sausage-making machines. You put raw materials in at one end, turn the crank, and at the other end, you get output – nicely wrapped-up sausages. Wherever you are in your studies of machine learning / deep learning / neural networks / AI, you know there’s got to be more. If we’re going to make anything like general artificial intelligence (GAI), we…
Statistical Mechanics and Personal Stories (On the Same Page!) Yikes! It’s Thursday morning already. I haven’t written to you for three weeks. That’s long enough that I have to pause and search my memory for my username to get into the website. Thanksgiving was lovely. The Thursday after that was grading, all day – and for several days before and after. By now, I (and most of you) have had a few days of recovery, from what has been…
Neuromorphic Computing: Statistical Mechanics & Criticality Last week, I suggested that we were on the verge of something new, and referenced an article by von Bubnoff: A brain built from atomic switches [that] can learn, together with the follow-on article Brain Built on Switches. The key innovation described in this article was a silver mesh, as shown in the following figure. This mesh is a “network of microscopically thin intersecting silver wires,” grown via a combination of electrochemical and…
Next-Generation Neural Network Architectures: More Brain-Like Three generations of artificial intelligence.. The third generation is emerging … right about … now. That’s what is shown in this figure, presented in log-time scale. Brief history of AI in log-time scale The first generation of AI, symbolic AI, began conceptually around 1954, and lasted until 1986; 32 years. On the log-time scale shown in the figure above, this entire era takes place under the first curve; the black bell-shaped curve on…
Tweaking Our Own Mental State: Getting Easier All the Time This last spring, twelve minutes changed my life forever. I got into a heck of a fistfight. I went into a dark cave, and put on an alternate identity and transformed into the baddest-a** thing around. I had one of the most spiritual, exalted, uplifting experiences that I’ve ever had. And I fell in love. So here’s the story. I was at the NVIDIA GTC (GPU Technology Conference) this…
Artificial Intelligence and Jobs by the Year 2025: One of my biggest take-aways from the recent (May, 2017) NVIDIA GTC (GPU Technology Conference) was less about the technology, and more about the near-term jobs impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Making smart education and career decisions is crucial, as the emerging combination of AI and robotics will have a huge impact on jobs. Those of you studying artificial intelligence, deep learning, and neural networks will have a stronger career…
Just one of the slides from a presentation that I’m working up for an upcoming online presentation at Northwestern University, but it tells the story. Just one more thought: here’s the rapid pace of evolution within just the image analysis realm of AI, largely due to multiple layers (sometimes, many, many, MANY multiple layers) of networks, a good fraction of which are Convolutional Neural Networks, or CNNs. Error rates have dropped from over 15% to about 3% within just four…
GPUs, CPUs, MIPS, and Brain-Based Computation Quick links to useful diagrams: Michael Galloy has produced a good chart showing increase in GPU vs CPU processing over this past decade; nicely continues the line of thought about nonlinear increases in processing power. Look at: http://michaelgalloy.com/2013/06/11/cpu-vs-gpu-performance.html See also post by Karl Rupp: http://www.karlrupp.net/2013/06/cpu-gpu-and-mic-hardware-characteristics-over-time/ Also, this post by NVIDIA: http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter29.html For detailed discussion (including appropriate algorithms/methods), but NOT figures, see: http://pcl.intel-research.net/publications/isca319-lee.pdf Debunking the 100X GPU vs. CPU Myth: An Evaluation of Throughput Computing…
2012 and Beyond: Tools for Predicting the Next Sixty Years Is the world coming to an end on Dec. 21st, 2012, or not? Very likely, not. We’ll still wake up in the morning, in the same beds in which we went to sleep in the night before. We’ll still walk out to our cars, or get to our Metro stations, on time. And we’ll likely stop for the same “cup of joe” on the way to work. But will our…