China Just Achieved A “Brain Scale” AI Computer

Today in “Skynet does Asia” news, Chinese scientists are boasting about a new supercomputer that is so far, it can run AI at the speed of a human brain.

The computer, referred to as the Newest Generation Sunway supercomputer, is now on a par with the latest machine built by the US Department of Energy, called Frontier, according to The Star and the South China Morning Post.

Earlier this month, Frontier had been named the world’s most powerful computer.

The Chinese scientists named their AI model ‘bagualu’, which means “alchemist’s pot”. It was trained by the Sunway machine to have 174 trillion parameters, on a par with that of a human brain for the first time, the report says. 

The Sunway “has a speed of a billion billion operations per second, expressed as 5.3 floating-point operations per second (exaflops), and more than 37 million CPU cores,” the report says. This is four times as many as the Frontier machine.

It also has nine petabytes of memory, which is enough to hold 2 million different DVD quality movies. Communication between “brain” nodes is so quick it rivals a human changing his or her mind. 

Potential uses for the AI could be in facial recognition and autonomous driving, the report says. It could also be used for life sciences, chemistry and language processing. (The article left out eventual machine-run world domination, for some reason…)

The technology debuted at a virtual meeting of Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming 2022, an international conference put together by the Association for Computing Machinery, a U.S. based organization.