definition of a good doctor or lawyer?” he
says. “It’s someone with a lot of wisdom
acquired by experience, someone who’s
seen a lot of cases, read and digested a
lot of research and comes up with good
answers. They can’t always be correct,
but given the knowledge that exists they
come up with the best reasonable answer
based on their experience.”
The most exciting opportunity for
machine intelligence is to do that with
all human knowledge, he says. “Take a
medical oracle that can read all of the
medical research ever published and
can resolve and identify discrepancies.
It can read all of the patient records that
have ever been recorded. And it can come
up with the best answer based on all
of human knowledge. It’s not perfect,
because all of human knowledge isn’t
all knowledge, but it’s the best we can
possibly do, and the opportunity there
for totally solving a whole load of human
conditions must be enormous.”
Graphcore’s founders say that more
than 100 developers or end users are
currently working with their IPUs,
although they decline to identify any.
“I’m not sure we’re allowed to say
[who they are],” says Toon. Is it a fair
assumption that big brand investors and
individuals such as Demis Hassabis, a
co-founder of DeepMind (see p104) who
invested personally in Graphcore, are
testing the technology? He bats away the
question. “They are strategic investors
in our company. They’ve made a decision
that our tech could be strategically
important to their businesses, so you
might surmise that something’s going
on, but we couldn’t possibly comment.”
However, a few days after WIRED’s
conversation with Toon and Knowles,
an approach to BMW i Ventures (the
car giant’s venture arm focused on
automotive tech) suggests a possible
application. While BMW wouldn’t
confirm whether it was working with
Graphcore (this information is commer-
cially sensitive), it’s understood from a
separate source that BMW is exploring
the possibilities of the startup’s IPUs.
Tobias Jahn, an investment principal at
BMW i Ventures, says his firm became
interested in Graphcore because of its
technology’s potential for automotive
applications. “For highly and fully
automated driving, commonly called
levels four and five, efficient AI accel-
eration will be indispensable,” he says.are, from a manufacturing perspective.
Certainly I don’t think they have the
ability to realistically catch up in the
next five years – and possibly not in the
next decade. The requirements around
leading-edge manufacturing are far
more than just having capital available.”
However, when it comes to chip design- particularly for AI – Hermann Hauser
reckons the chip giants will not be able
to rest on their laurels for long. “[Chip
design is] still something that the west
seems to be doing better than China.
But, having said that, China produces
more STEM graduates than Europe and
America put together. Chinese univer-
sities are now overtaking American
universities in terms of publication of
scientific articles. And China leads the
way in the number of patents it files.”
Toon says the Chinese government
went through the AI equivalent of a
“Sputnik moment” when DeepMind’s
AlphaGo became the first computer
program to defeat a professional Go
player, in Seoul in 2016. “They’ve been
investing a lot of money, and the thing
China is doing differently is that they’re
making data available to companies
they’re trying to support,” he says.
“They see, as we do, that this is a
fundamental shift in computing and this
is their opportunity to try to become
independent using their own technology,
rather than being dependent on other
people’s. So I would say they are very
actively trying to support and build their
own technology at the semiconductor
Graphcore is currently a niche player
in a vast global semiconductor market
that grew by 13.4 per cent in 2018 to
$477 billion, according to research firm
Gartner. In two decades, the industry
has undergone a fundamental shift, with
manufacturing moving from the US and
Europe to Asia. “That partly reflects the
lower cost base for production in Asia
and partly where incremental demand
is being driven from these days – and
clearly China has played a significant
part in that,” says Jim Fontanelli, a
senior analyst at Arete Research.
With that in mind, could Graph-
core’s competition ultimately come
from China? It’s complicated. In 2018,
there were no Chinese companies among
the world’s leading 15 semiconductor
corporations (which were headed by
Samsung and Hynix in South Korea,
Intel in the US, and TSMC in Taiwan,
which manufactures leading-edge
chips, including Graphcore’s). Fonta-
nelli doesn’t see China catching up
with South Korea, the US and western
Europe any time soon. “The ability to
design chips is largely independent of
the ability to manufacture, and China
still has a significant gap to where the
leading guys like TSMC, Samsung or IntelAbove: The C2 PCIe card that
Graphcore has developed for
its intelligence processing unit09-19-FTgraphcore.indd 155 19/07/2019 17:07