Looking beyond silicon to squeeze more out of chips

New York

ALI Farhadi holds a puny US$5 computer, called a Raspberry Pi, comfortably in his palm and exults that his team of researchers has managed to squeeze into it a powerful program that can recognise thousands of objects.

Mr Farhadi, a computer scientist at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, calls his advance "artificial intelligence (AI) at your fingertips". The experimental program could drastically lower the cost of AI and improve privacy because you wouldn't need to share information over the Internet.