Experts developing AI chips interviewed for the PassW0rd radio show say a battle is being fought for the world of the future.
In ‘The Chips are down: The making of the metaverse’ those interviewed paint a picture of huge competition. Where companies manoeuvre to promote their technologies as the future digital infrastructure.
AI chips are now considered key to the development of the virtual reality 21st century-controlled future. Due to this AI chip development is poised to become a billion-pound economic engine room for metaverses created and run by AI systems. Many commentators say companies are now backing technologies as though they are political ideologies.
As the ultimate goal is the development of a super-intelligent AI infrastructure, the stakes are incredibly high.
The race for super-human intelligence
“It’s a race. It’s quite clear that we will see something that we could characterize as super-human intelligence in the near future. A government entity won’t create it, a private company will. It’s going to be Google or Apple or Microsoft or Amazon or Alibaba or IBM,” said the celebrated Finnish hacker and futurologist Mikko Hypponen, who added.
“All of them are investing heavily into this area. All of them want to reap the benefits from any breakthroughs in this area and everybody wants to be the first.”
The AI chips weapons race
As a result, control of the underlying fabric of the metaverse has now become of crucial economic and military importance. A fact underlined by the US’s recent decision to embark on a technology war with China over the development of AI chips and semiconductor technology.
The importance of this AI future was stressed by the US National Security Commission on AI when it reported to the US Government on March 1, 2021.
“AI will transform all aspects of military affairs. AI applications will help militaries prepare, sense and understand, decide, and execute faster and more efficiently. Numerous weapon systems will leverage one or more AI technologies. AI systems will generate options for commanders and create battle networks connecting systems across all domains. It will transform logistics, procurement, training, and the design and development of new hardware. Adopting AI will demand the development of new tactics and operational concepts. In the future, warfare will pit algorithm against algorithm. The sources of battlefield advantage will shift from traditional factors like force size and levels of armaments. It will move to factors like superior data collection and assimilation, connectivity, computing power, algorithms, and system security.”
Staying on track is essential
As a result, making the right decision on the development of the technological infrastructure is vitally important.
As the AI futurologist Rohit Talwar, the head of the think tank and consultancy Fast Future says. “There are these different schools of thought. One school of thought says the best way to do this is to move the processing of the AI, the data set, as close as possible to the data at the chip level and therefore it’s going to be the fastest possible. Or you just have a very large chip. That works well for applications where you don’t need to keep updating the model.
“So what does that look like? Is it just what we’ve got faster and faster? Is it going back to analogue computing so we can do more and more computing in memory? Some are going down that route. Another group is doing what they call capacitive computing, basically building a 3D structure. Layering the layers on top of each other allowing you to do a lot more in 3D. It allows you to get closer to how functionality happens in our brains. While IBM and others are going down the Neuromorphic route, creating a chip that more closely replicates how the brain works,” said Talwar.
