back to article Artificial intelligence is good for at least one thing – making hardware important again

If you're cynical about artificial intelligence, here's one ray of sunshine for you: it's got engineers around the globe focusing on improving number-crunching and computing performance right down to the silicon level. Rather than throwing thousands upon thousands of generic boring servers at problems, now techies are doubling …

  1. TRT Silver badge

    I suppose everything has its place...

    VMs are not the solution to every single compute requirement.

  2. Herby
    Joke

    Artificial Intelligence...

    Isn't.

    Sorry it isn't in the 'info' pages Mr. Stallman.

    Of course, it may not be a joke, but that is for another time.

  3. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Stop

    "Treat the AI as a team member,"

    No, no and no. The statistical analysis tool is most definitely not a team member. Stop that nonsense right now.

    It's all about maths and statistics. It is not some magical being with feelings and problems. It won't have a coffee and suddenly become more active and more accurate. It will not one day morph into a similacrum of Data and start prancing around the office. It's a data-crunching algorythm based on statistics.

    Understand statistics and you have a reliable tool. A tool.

    Not a team member.

    1. deive
      Thumb Up

      Re: "Treat the AI as a team member,"

      +1! A.I. does not exist this is machine learning... (I think I am boring myself saying this now!)

    2. TRT Silver badge

      Re: "A tool. Not a team member."

      Well, it depends what team you're on. There's a lot of members of my team that are tools.

    3. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: "Treat the AI as a team member,"

      I can only hope that when these companies finally get the technology to create a sentient program, which will have a few tasks but will be rather useless, that they have learned enough not to make it. For now, I don't care that the process to improve the mathematical basis is called training--it takes in data of one format and outputs data of another format. That's not a colleague. If it starts giving me wrong answers, I'll fix it by deleting recent training data, not asking it questions. If it never works right, I'll fix it by throwing it away and starting over after an analysis of what went wrong. Maybe we want to do that to coworkers who aren't being helpful, but we don't actually get to try it.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Understand statistics and you have a reliable tool. A tool.

    A tool, touted by middle damagement and the oxygen thieves in sales.

    A tool, touted by tools.

  5. Douchus McBagg

    its just the latest name for an old thing

    cloud - internet - network - mainframe

    AI - algorithm - equation - excel sheet knocked up by a kid during a summer work experience placement

    blah blah blah and the wheel keeps on turning...

  6. JeffyPoooh
    Pint

    Hardware? We don't need no stinking hardware.

    Recursive Virtualization.

    Yeah, 'It's Emulation All The Way Down.'

    The advantage of such Recursive Emulation is that if you need more memory, you simply change one line of code to increase the size of the array. Same with CPU speed - just type in a higher number. Infinite free computational power is nearly here.

    You may think that this is all completely preposterous, but it's the only known explanation of why Microsoft bought Minecraft for billions of dollars. Obviously Microsoft were after the technology behind those famous simulated CPUs built-up from the blocks within the Minecraft virtual world.

    See? It all fits together perfectly.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Egg on face

    This does throw some serious egg on Gartner's face. Again.

    Weren't they the ones who were clamoring that everything is software and that hardware is obsolete? Every technologist with two brain cells to rub together saw what Nvidia was doing and why they are so successful and concluded that GPUs,ASICs, and FPGAs are coming back hot and with a vengeance.

    Not surprised about Gartner, though. A group of overpaid idiots who after miraculously having a few quarters of randomly correct predictions went right back to being the ass of IT.

    I've been a El reg vulture since pretty much day one and this is my daily read but the quality has cratered massively over the past years. If I want to read corporate PR (e.g. Chris Mellor has zero analysis and is basically just rehashing press releases and shilling Nutanix) I can go read ZDnet. At least they have some PC reviews. When was the last time El Reg actually reviewed a product or tech?

    You know, I get it. You want to be "edgy", get invited to all the cool parties. So you bash Google and Microsoft and Cisco and IBM (ok, IBM deserves bashing) relentlessly but ignore the massive innovation that happens at those companies.

    YOU -COMPLETELY- MISSED GOOGLE'S AI ADVANCES. Like completely and utterly missed it. I would have expected you to have a scoop months before it gets presented on a world wide stage. How is this even possible? For crying out loud, they are YEARS ahead of everyone else in one of the most fundamental and revolutionary technologies for human civilization. And.You.Missed.It.

    Some great technology reporters you are.

    I think you should go reflect on what happened to you and how you lost the plot. This site has gone to shyte.

  8. I.Geller Bronze badge

    I discovered and patented AI. If you have questions - ask, it's for free.

    AI is about structuring of texts, that is parsing and annotating of each word by its unique dictionary definition. Thus it's indeed mostly about hard and not software.

    I discovered and patented AI. If you have questions - ask, it's for free.

  9. I.Geller Bronze badge

    AI is about structuring of texts, which is hardware problem.

    AI is about structuring of texts, which is hardware problem. The texts ought to be parsed, a unique dictionary definition for each word found.

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