Facebook’s AI chief researching new breed of semiconductor

FILE PHOTO: A 3D printed Facebook logo is seen in front of displayed cyber code in this illustration taken March 22, 2016. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

Facebook Inc’s chief AI researcher has suggested the company is working on a new class of semiconductor that would work very differently than most existing designs. 

Yann LeCun said that future chips used for training deep learning algorithms, which underpin most of the recent progress in artificial intelligence, would need to be able to manipulate data without having to break it up into multiple batches. Most existing computer chips, in order to handle the amount of data these machine learning systems need to learn, divide it into chunks and processes each batch in sequence.