The Path to Nervana — my PDP textbook from 1988

I started my PhD in EE focusing on how to accelerate neural networks by porting them to parallel processing computers. Yup.

My comment on Nervana, the first dedicated neural network ASIC to outperform GPUs: “Machine learning is the underlying technology that makes the explosion of big data manageable, with a technology sufficiently advanced as to appear magical at the first encounter. With applications at the cutting edge of almost everything — from social graph mining to systems biology to robotics and AI — machine learning empowers us to build complex systems that transcend human understanding. Nervana will help accelerate these futures, as the locus of learning in engineering shifts from the end products to the process of their creation.”

The news this morning on our latest investment, and my latest board seat: GigaOm and VentureBeat