[libre-riscv-dev] AI Accelerator

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Wednesday, February 5, 2020, Jacob Lifshay <programmerjake at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> and, even if it's a few orders of magnitude slower,


not quite. it's like the crypto export restrictions.  above a certain
capability, hardware is powerful enough to crack certain algorithms, or be
used to encrypt data in bulk and with sufficient complexity large enough
such that it overwhelms intelligence gathering resources to decrypt within
an active operational timespan.

thus, yes, *ultra-fast* general purpose computers are BXPA restricted
(considered to be weapons). 18 months ago i met someone with a Dell laptop
that had 128 GB of RAM. he wasn't allowed to take it out of the US.

here, things are similar, except, additionally, the "threat" (and the
benefits) are both "in potentia".

a software algorithm running hundreds of times slower that cannot be used
for real time image processing to detect objects (and people) to avoid is
useless in practical real world applications.

it is however great as a research project.

the difference then is the scope and impact, and unfortunately, unlike
encryption, because there have not yet *been* any abuses of AI (they're on
their way) there are no restrictions like there are on encryption.

i say "no abuses", i mean of course "no countermeasures to AI being used by
governments to the surveillance that governments want to use AI for, such
as face recognition and pre-crime prediction"

this is where encryption restriction significantly differs from AI
restriction when it comes to hardware.

l.



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