Computer scientists in China claim to have launched an artificial intelligence program that uses an architecture as complex as the human brain, reports The Independent.
The researchers described it as a “brain-scale” model of AI that could have applications in fields ranging from self-driving vehicles and computer vision to chemistry and other scientific discoveries.
The artificial intelligence model, dubbed “bagualu” or “alchemist’s pot”, was launched on the latest generation of the Sunway supercomputer based at the National Supercomputing Center in eastern Jiangsu province.
The Sunway TaihuLight is officially the world’s fourth most powerful supercomputer, but researchers say the latest demonstration puts it on par with US Frontier, which currently tops the list.
Sunway was ranked as the world’s most powerful computer between 2016 and 2018 by the Top500 supercomputer list, but Chinese institutions no longer provide performance data to the list. China still has 173 Top 500 supercomputers, more than any other country.
The South China Morning Post reported that the Bagualu program worked with 174 trillion parameters, rivaling by some estimates the number of synapses in the human brain.
The publication reported that the Sunway supercomputer has more than 37 million processor cores, four times more than the Frontier coupecomputer in the United States. It also has nine petabytes of storage, the equivalent of over 2 million HD movies.
One researcher said that its power gave Sunway’s latest version the ability to perform parallel computing in a way that mimics human thinking.
I wonder if this supercomputer starts to think like a human, China will tell the world about it?
