by Angela Guess
Alex Woodie recently wrote in Datanami, “Artificial intelligence has never been as pervasive as it is today. From Google’s self-driving cars from to Hilton’s new Watson-powered hotel concierge, we are witnessing an explosion of AI capabilities. But while it may appear that machines are taking over, they are still tied to their human masters for one very important task: training. ‘We’re in the middle of the ‘Big Bang’ moment of AI,’ NVIDIA‘s Senior Product Manager Will Ramey says in the AISummit’s new ebook on the topic. ‘We now have the deep neural networks, the explosion of big data, and now thanks to the leap in processing power with enhanced GPUs, we have the full package to see a real shift in the development of commercial real-world AI applications’.”
Woodie goes on, “NVIDIA is at the center of this AI renaissance with its powerful GPUs and software tools used to harness the processors for big data and high performance computing (GPU) workloads. No fewer than 170 of the company’s GPUs powered AlphaGo, a Google Research program designed to play the ancient Chinese board game called Go. While IBM‘s AI technology famously triumphed over the chess master Gary Kasparov, no computer had ever beaten a Go expert, until Google’s DeepMind system beat Fan Hui earlier this year. The algorithms are playing ever-bigger roles in nearly every part of our lives, from politics and sports to medicine and finance. The combination of big data collection and AI-powered computation is truly ushering in a new age of human-computer interaction. Every day, computers are getting better at anticipating our needs, recommending solutions, and handling rote tasks.”
Photo credit: Flickr/ NASA Goddard Photo and Video