Facebook’s AI chief working on a new semiconductor that works differently other designs

Facebook’s chief AI researcher has suggested the company is working on a new class of semiconductor that would work very differently than most existing designs.

Yann LeCun said that future chips used for training deep learning algorithms, which underpin most of the recent progress in artificial intelligence, would need to be able to manipulate data without having to break it up into multiple batches. Most existing computer chips, in order to handle the amount of data these machine learning systems need to learn, divide it into chunks and processes each batch in sequence.

‘We don’t want to leave any stone unturned, particularly if no one else is turning them over,’ he said in an interview ahead of the release Monday of a research paper he authored on the history and future of computer hardware designed to handle artificial intelligence.