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In ML/AI space, at least some people thing analog computing is the next big thing, https://www.forbes.com/sites/karlfreund/2021/09/23/ibm-resea.... It hasn't taken off, yet, though.

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I know, I've had my eye on this topic for a while.

Honestly it seems like a perfect application. Neural networks are analog systems. An analog computer can represent neurons very accurately and the entire network is inherently parallel, for free!

I can't wait to see what comes out of this research

I agree.

My research was in this direction. We already know that these analog neural chips could be orders of magnitude faster than digital equivalents. There is also a lot of military research going on in this area for few decades. However architecture innovations are much faster on software level and dedicated hardware approaches have not been able to catch up. Once things slow down on software level, slowly hardware llms could become the norm.

I don't venture too far into analog electronics so I don't know for sure, but it seems like an analog FPGA type system could really take off.

Cypress has been doing something like that for a long time now. Reconfigurable Analog electronics is an interesting field.

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