in the 60s. Heck, they were even working on neural nets back then
I remember playing with neural nets in the late 1980s. They had optical character recognition going even back then. The thing was, their idea of “big networks” was nowhere near big enough scale to do anything as impressive as categorize images: cats vs birds.
We’ve hit the point where supercomputers in your pocket are…
The Cray-1, a pioneering supercomputer from the 1970s, achieved a peak performance of around 160 MFLOPS, it cost $8 million - or $48 million in today’s dollars, it weighed 5 tons
Modern smartphones, even mid-range models, can perform significantly faster than the Cray-1. For example, a 2019 Google Pixel 3 achieved 19 GFLOPS
19000/160 = over 100x as powerful as a Cray from the 1970s.
I just started using a $110 HAILO-8 for image classification, it can perform 26TOPS, that’s over 160,000x a 1970s Cray (granted, the image processor is working with 8 bit ints, the Cray worked with 64 bit floats… but still… 20,000x the operational power for 1/436,000th the cost and 1/100,000th the weight.)
There were around 60 Crays delivered by 1983, HAILO alone is selling on the order of a million chips a year…
Things have sped up significantly in the last 50 years.
I remember playing with neural nets in the late 1980s. They had optical character recognition going even back then. The thing was, their idea of “big networks” was nowhere near big enough scale to do anything as impressive as categorize images: cats vs birds.
We’ve hit the point where supercomputers in your pocket are…
19000/160 = over 100x as powerful as a Cray from the 1970s.
I just started using a $110 HAILO-8 for image classification, it can perform 26TOPS, that’s over 160,000x a 1970s Cray (granted, the image processor is working with 8 bit ints, the Cray worked with 64 bit floats… but still… 20,000x the operational power for 1/436,000th the cost and 1/100,000th the weight.)
There were around 60 Crays delivered by 1983, HAILO alone is selling on the order of a million chips a year…
Things have sped up significantly in the last 50 years.