A new chip prototype from IBM Research’s lab in California, long in the making, has the potential to upend how and where AI is used efficiently

We’re in the midst of a Cambrian explosion in AI. Over the last decade, AI has gone from theory and small tests to enterprise-scale use cases. But the hardware used to run AI systems, although increasingly powerful, was not designed with today’s AI in mind. As AI systems scale, the costs skyrocket. And Moore’s Law, the theory that the density of circuits in processors would double every two years, has slowed.

But new research out of IBM Research’s lab in Almaden, California, nearly two decades in the making, has the potential to drastically shift how we can efficiently scale up powerful AI hardware systems.