AI Is Making Hardware Sexy Again

Another hardware post, although this time a bit more general than a new supercomputer. Almost 20 years ago at an AI  conference in Austin, Texas, I remember a discussion revolving around how great it would be if we AI people had the processing power that game designers insisted on for their games to run. If gamers could insist that their computers had powerful game cards, why couldn't AI insist on dedicated AI cards? We never got the AI cards and so we learned to use GPU's to enable our algorithms to run in reasonable time. However, now things are changing and increasingly hardware is being tailored to AI's needs as this article in Forbes makes clear.