Today(July 7, 2017), Samsung’s earning surprise made people truly surprised. Not only it surprised the financial market but also people in the tech industry took a little bite of the future we are facing. When Softbank in Japan bought ARM people were questioning if that was a right bet for the future. Now it seems clear what that purchase meant.
The high demand in semiconductor is inevitable as we see the future machine learning environment. Hardware as a service is a valid service only if it comes with a machine learning capability. Imagine Cadillac subscription service with the autonomous driving. Consumers buy products with Alexa or Google home(Virtual Assistant) and the products are made and delivered without a labor. Take a look at Adidas’s new factory in Germany and Amazon’s work on drone logistics.
The market demand in this new industry revolution is unimaginably high and we witnessed today by Samsung. Then what is next? We can find an answer from 3 simple mathematical equations.
1. This is a graph which depicts a human brain synapse. We can see the voltage change over time in a brain.
2. This is a sigmoid function which is used for the machine learning. It is an activation function in the hidden layer. Now we can clearly see the mimicry. Compare the sigmoid function to the human brain voltage graph.
3. Lastly, it is a diode graph. If you are an computer engineer, we learned this graph at the electrical engineering 101.
First two graphs show what we did so far. AlphaGo won the game against Korean Go player, Lee Sedol. A human brain computerized in the software. What is next? The future is a human brain in the hardware just as the 3rd graph looks similar to the 1st. A Neuromorphic chip designed by General Vision in the US is now produced by Nepes in Korea. Soon it will hit the market. Imagine the future where any device can be taught by simply implementing a neuromorphic chip without worrying about performance dragging by computation. This is the future we will see soon and it will be just like today we will be surprised by the new industry era.
