Nvidia’s chips turned out to be especially efficient for training the neural networks used in a technique called deep learning that has recently made software much smarter and caused tech giants and investors to pile money into machine-learning research. This week the company announced a new chip designed specifically for the task (see “A $2 Billion Chip to Accelerate Artificial Intelligence”). Huang spoke with Will Knight, MIT Technology Review’s senior editor for AI and robotics, at the company’s annual technology conference in San Jose this week.

Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of the chipmaker Nvidia : We’re trying to build a better plane rather than figure out how a bird works. Some people describe it as neurons, but the analogy to the brain is very loose. To us it’s a whole bunch of mathematics that extracts the important features out of images or voice or sensor action. Any analogy to a brain is not necessarily that important

via The Man Selling Shovels in the Machine-Learning Gold Rush