Kunle Olukotun: How to Make AI More Democratic

Electrical engineer Kunle Olukotun has built a career out of building computer chips for the world.

These days his attention is focused on new-age chips that will broaden the reach of artificial intelligence to new uses and new audiences — making AI more democratic.

The future will be dominated by AI, he says, and one key to that change rests in the hardware that makes it all possible — faster, smaller, more powerful computer chips. He imagines a world filled with highly efficient, specialized chips built for specific purposes, versus the relatively inefficient but broadly applicable chips of today.

Making that vision a reality will require hardware that focuses less on computation and more on streamlining the movement of data back and forth, a function that now claims 90% of computing power, as Olukotun tells host Russ Altman, associate director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Watch below and subscribe here.

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