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Technology: Breakthrough in Neural Computing
After ten years of research at IBM with $53 million in funding from DARPA and 200 people assigned to the project, IBM has unveiled a new superchip which is an attempt to emulate the way that a human brain operates. The new chip contains a million components dubbed as ‘neurons’ or ‘brain cells’ connected together by 4096 neurosynaptic cores, all laid out on a 64 by 64 grid. They’re calling it a “neurosynaptic” chip.
Compared to standard chips being produced by Intel for today’s laptop and desktop computers which typically have 1.4 billion transistors and consume 35 to 140 watts of power, the new IBM brain chip comes with 5.4 billion transistors and draws only 70 milliwatts of power, the equivalent of a hearing-aid battery.
Dharmendra Modha, principal investigator for the project, said that “you can tile these chips seamlessly, and it becomes twice the chip. We have already tiled 16 of them in a 4 x 4 array, to create a 16 million neuron, 4 billion synapse core.”
The new computer is designed to mimic humans. Richard Doherty, the research director at the Envisioneering Group, commented that “we wouldn’t be able to navigate through our world without senses. These devices could one day see the world around us through vision, smell…sight, and sound, just the way we get around the world.”
But some have criticized the IBM announcement as inflated. Nayaran Srinivasa, a researcher at HRL Laboratories , said that “it’s definitely an achievement to make a chip of that scale…but I think the claims are a bit stretched because there is no learning happening on the chip… It’s not brain-like in a lot of ways. All the learning happens off-line, on traditional computers.. The von Neumann component is doing all the ‘brain’ work, so in that sense it’s not breaking any paradigm.”
Some worry too that as we advance technology we need to also do it in a controlled way. Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, recently commented on Twitter that “we need to be super careful with A.I. It is potentially more dangerous than nukes.” Steven Hawking made similar comments that “Artificial intelligence could be a real danger in the not too distant future… A robot might design improvements to itself and outsmart us all.”
