Stanford Radio

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman: E142 | Kunle Olukotun: How to make AI more democratic A chip designer talks about how advances in hardware will be needed to make the much-hyped artificially intelligent future a reality. Electrical engineer Kunle Olukotun has built a career out of building computer chips for the world. These days his attention is focused on new-age chips that will broaden the reach of artificial intelligence to new uses and new audiences—making AI more democratic. The future will be dominated by AI, he says, and one key to that change rests in the hardware that makes it all possible—faster, smaller, more powerful computer chips. He imagines a world filled with highly efficient, specialized chips built for specific purposes, versus the relatively inefficient but broadly applicable chips of today. Making that vision a reality will require hardware that focuses less on computation and more on streamlining the movement of data back and forth, a function that now claims 90% of comput