Neural networks on the go [news]

Artificial intelligence systems based on neural networks have had quite a string of recent successes: One beat human masters at the game of Go, another made up beer reviews, and another made psychedelic art. But taking these supremely complex and power-hungry systems out into the real world and installing them in portable devices is no easy feat. This February, however, at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, teams from MIT, Nvidia, and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) brought that goal closer. They showed off prototypes of lowpower chips that are designed to run artificial neural networks that could, among other things, give smartphones a bit of a clue about what they are seeing and allow self-driving cars to predict pedestrians' movements.