AI Hardware Revolution: The Future of Information Processing

The next generation of information revolution is heavily reliant on specialized AI hardware. This is because generative artificial intelligence applications, such as large language models, require copious and complicated hardware underneath their user-friendly skins.

AI Hardware Revolution

Generative AI applications became mainstream when ChatGPT went viral in 2022. However, they require specialized hardware accelerators to maximize their potential. According to Arnob Ghosh, an assistant professor in New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Electrical and Computer Engineering department, current design tools’ complexity and required hardware expertise hinder innovation.

“Specialized hardware accelerators are crucial for maximizing the potential of AI tools, but current design tools’ complexity and required hardware expertise hinder innovation.”

Ghosh, along with his colleagues Shaahin Angizi and Abdallah Khreishah, had the meta-idea to tweak a large language model as their assistant. They thought of training it to learn the context of what’s needed when designing hardware acceleration, based on a user’s needs for accuracy, energy usage, and speed.

Their ideas include providing some hand-crafted instructions for basic hardware designs so the LLM has a basis from which to extrapolate its own creations, fine-tuning the model’s parameters for specific tasks, and using Khreishah’s graphical neural network to simplify how much virtual thinking the model must perform.

AI Hardware Design

Companies like AMD, IBM, Intel, and Nvidia are all deeply involved in the AI business. IBM is developing its own hardware, while AMD and Nvidia are in the research stages, and secretive Apple is starting to send employees to relevant conferences.

The NJIT researchers already released their dataset and are now developing a prototype of the prompt optimization, funded by a faculty seed grant. They’re aiming to have their first framework complete by the end of the fall 2024 semester.

“The world that we want to create is accelerator design with minimal human intervention. Perhaps some automated system can verify whether the codes or the designs are good or bad efficiently.”

Ultimately, the future of AI hardware design is exciting and holds much promise. With the potential for minimal human intervention, the possibilities are endless.

AI Future