Microsoft Charts Its Own Path on Artificial Intelligence https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-charts-its-own-path-on-artificial-intelligence/ "Instead, Microsoft is pitching the idea of running AI projects atop chips called FPGAs, whose designs can be reprogrammed to support new forms of software on the fly. That allows Microsoft to avoid having to dabble in designing silicon for its servers—it buys its FPGAs from chip giant Intel. Some companies are already buying into Microsoft’s vision." "Microsoft says customers taking advantage of Project Brainwave can process a million images for just 21 cents using a standard image recognition model, and that a single image can be processed in just 2.8 milliseconds. The company claims that's better than any rival cloud service today, but the true competitiveness of Microsoft's technology won't be apparent until outsiders have had a chance to test it head-to-head against other options. Those include Google's TPUs, and graphics chips from Nvidia, the leading supplier to machine-learning projects. It’s also unclear how widely applicable Microsoft's Brainwave will prove to be. FPGAs aren’t widely used in cloud computing, and so most companies don’t have the expertise needed to program them. " "Some Google servers now include chips customized for machine learning called TPUs that the company designed in-house to deliver better power and efficiency. Google has also started renting them out to its cloud-computing customers. Facebook recently said it is interested in designing similar chips for its own data centers. Both are competing with a pack of startups crafting their own AI server chips, which collectively received hundreds of millions of dollars in funding last year."