Future Computers Will Be Radically Different (Analog Computing)

Agreed. I've never really gotten into neural networks, most of the times I start but get distracted or bored/lost and suddenly enough a Vertiasium video pops up and about everything just slots into place, stuff you've glossed over or heard before just make sense. ▶ this video . Start at minute 4:00.

I think they're saying analog computers could be the future of computing. Veritasium explains it really well in general here (and demos the device) ▶ this video

Veritasium has a good video about analog computers. It covers how they work, what they are used for, pros and cons compared to digital, what they look like today, a bit of the history and their possible future. ▶ this video

I found this Veritasium video interesting, about a company that is paring down models so they fit on analog chips, so the chips can be used in self-contained devices. It also appears that quantum computers may be even better for matrix math that transformers rely on. If all these hardware advances pan out... ▶ this video link

Great Veritasium video on YouTube about analog neuromorphic architectures and their promise for lower-power operations: ▶ this video

It's a big area of research in AI. Veritasium has two great videos on it: ▶ this video link I found a hackernews discussion for the second one: link

basicly, we can do things like matrix operations and differntial equations using specialized hardware that performs computation over analog signals rather than buidlign discrete systems. the end result is that we dont' need anywhere near the level of compute to do the job as its done using an analog of the physical process. here's two youtube videos that explain is much better than I could. link ▶ this video suffice to say, your average house fly exhibits behavior that absolutely dominates our best drones and with a fraction of the circuitry.

This paradigm for computing was already covered three years ago by Veratasium in ▶ this video . Maybe not the specific photonic system that they are describing. Which I'm sure has some significant improvements over what existed then. But the idea of using analog approximations of existing neural net AI models, to allow us to run AI models far more cheaply, with far less energy. Whether or not this system is the one that wins out, I'm very sure that AI run on an analog system will have a very important role to play in the future. It will allow technologies like guiding autonomous robots with AI models running on hardware inside of the robot.

A couple years ago Veritasium did a video on analog computers, which included a segment on Mythic AI that uses NAND flash cells kind of "undervolted" as an analog computer to run neural networks. ▶ this video link

The Veritasium Youtube channel did a video about this about a year ago: ▶ this video They visit Texas company Mythic AI to discuss how they use flash memory for machine learning. There's a California company named Syntiant doing something similar.

That's really neat. Veritasium did a couple of videos on analog computing a year ago. I'm glad there are people lowering the barrier to entry. link ▶ this video

link is an analog chip for doing neural nets. ▶ this video (this is a time stamp'ed link for a video mentioned elsewhere in the comments).