Neural Magic is Coming to SXSW 2020: What’s Wrong with AI Computing?

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Neural Magic at SXSW
*Photo by Carlos Alfonso on Unsplash

What are you doing on March 19th of this year?

We’ll be at SXSW in Austin, TX, and our very own CEO Nir Shavit will be giving a talk!  If you’ll be at SXSW, we hope to see you at his talk.

Big Brain Burnout: Nir’s Talk for SXSW

Nir will be speaking on the topic of how we can balance the computing and data processing needs of artificial intelligence with the real-world constraints presented by hardware. 

See, if our brains processed information the same way today’s machine learning products consume computing power, you could fry an egg on your head. 

If you think about the brain like a circuit board that “lights up” when we need to process a thought, you’d see that only the neurons local to that specific thought would activate -- not the entire brain. 

In machine learning computing, the entire “brain” is lighting up, which is incredibly inefficient -- not to mention terrible for the environment. There is a better way. 

Instead of processing a petabyte of compute in a cell phone’s worth of memory (which is happening with today’s machine learning algorithms), we need to flip the script and process a petabyte’s worth of memory in a cell phone’s worth of compute power. 

In Nir’s talk, audience members will learn about:

  1. Memory and locality of reference and why these are more critical to machine learning performance than compute power
  2. Why we need to fundamentally rethink how we’re building products that rely on machine learning and AI -- it’s about memory, not raw compute power
  3. How we can look to the human brain as an inspiration, using what we learn to reconfigure AI systems to be more efficient (both performance-wise and environmentally)

We think it’s going to be a very provocative talk, and we hope you’ll consider attending!

Session Details

Here are the full session details:

  • Date: 03/19/2020
  • Start Time: 12:30 PM
  • End Time: 01:30 PM
  • Duration: 60 minutes
  • Capacity: 332
  • Venue: Hilton Austin Downtown
  • Room: Salon F

Full details are online here

Coffee or Lunch?

If you'd like to grab coffee of lunch with us, fill out our contact us form or email [email protected]. We will be in Austin on March 18th, 19th, and 20th. We hope to see you there!