Amazon Is Designing Custom AI Chips For Alexa

According to a report (paywalled) from The Information, Amazon is designing a custom artificial intelligence chip that would power future Echo devices and improve the quality and response time of its Alexa voice assistant. "The move closely followers rivals Apple and Google, both of which have already developed and deployed custom AI hardware at various scales," reports The Verge. From the report: While Amazon is unlikely to physically produce the chips, given its lack of both fabrication experience and a manufacturing presence in China, the news does pose a risk to the businesses of companies like Nvidia and Intel. Both companies have shifted large portions of their chipmaking expertise to AI and the future of the burgeoning field, and both make money by designing and manufacturing chips for companies like Apple, Amazon, and others. Amazon, which seeks to stay competitive in the smart home hardware market and in the realm of consumer-facing AI products, has nearly 450 people with chip expertise on staff, reports The Information, thanks to key hires and acquisitions the e-commerce giant has made in the last few years. The plan is for Amazon to develop its own AI chips so Alexa-powered products in its ever-expanding Echo line can do more on-device processing, instead of having to communicate with the cloud, a process that increases response rate times.

Its already perfectly possible to do speech ...

[Viol8]

... recognition in a standalone device with current hardware. Did amazon skimp on alexas spec?

Also smartphones have more than enough power to do it too (look at the realtime video image recognition they can do for example) and so I can only assume the reason Siri (and whatever android has) send the speech to be processed in the cloud is for data capture purposes, not because the devices themselves are not up to it.

The implication is scary

[Anonymous Coward]

We buy Alexa, we put it in our office and home, we hook it up, it's always on

Without AI, it's always listening

With AI, it's constantly listening, monitoring, guessing, thinking ...

From the mundane, it knows when you need to buy cereals

For the not-so mundane, it knows when your fridge gonna break down, what's the wear and tear on your car

For the scary part - it'll tell Amazon about who your friends are, what you guys talk about, when you meet,, what you guys are up to

In other words, Amazon will know what you

Re:

[known_coward_69]

Imagine the terror of receiving a coupon for some bar or lounge before you make plans to go there. Or knowing the crappy russian restaurants my in-laws always like to go to.

Re:

[scourfish]

The world is not full of idiots, except for the woke morons on the internet who think their shit smells sweeter than most.

Re:

[HiThere]

Depends on how you define "idiot". Remember that half the population has an IQ of under 100 on an approximately bell shaped curve, and also remember how tunnel visioned some rather smart people can be.

So while many people are not "idiots" on any particular subject, a much larger number are.

Now, of course, the definition of idiot isn't exactly fixed, but you were clearly using it in a figurative way rather then meaning, say, someone who was too stupid to tie his shoes or speak a grammatical sentence. (I th

Re:

[scourfish]

I define idiot as anyone who believes that they are more enlightened, smarter, or more self-righteous than others.

Re:

[HiThere]

I think I first heard of this in a story about a woman who started getting ads for pregnancy related items before she knew the test results.

Re:

[HiThere]

There are ways in which people are difficult to predict, but there are lots of ways in which they are quite predictable. We'd waste a huge amount of time trying to, say, figure out which way we were going to tie our shoes otherwise. The interesting thing is we often guess wrong about which of our actions are hard to predict and which are easy. That's part of how con-men and stage magicians make their living.

It's also true that the very concept of "free will" isn't one that people can really define withou

Re: Its already perfectly possible to do speech ..

[dj245]

Capturing the data is a good reason for Amazon, but another one is to prevent competitors from looking at the code. Hard to reverse engineer or copy software that you donâ(TM)t have access to.

Re:

[tlhIngan]

Also smartphones have more than enough power to do it too (look at the realtime video image recognition they can do for example) and so I can only assume the reason Siri (and whatever android has) send the speech to be processed in the cloud is for data capture purposes, not because the devices themselves are not up to i

Google and Amazon yes, Siri less so. Google and Amazon sell your data, so having more of it is beneficial for them. Apple doesn't, and having your data is a liability (law enforcement). Siri

Just

[M0j0_j0j0]

Seriosly.. who wants this Alexa shite?

Re:

[Opportunist]

Amazon

Re:

[justthinkit]

Imagine you are quadraplegic. I can assure you that about half your day is tied up with "activities of daily living" that force you to be away from a keyboard. Getting the picture?

Re: Just

[dj245]

Many of the new products we have today are the result of filling a market for the disabled or the elderly. Many as-seen-on-tv products are good examples of this. The Has this ever happened to you? lead-in probably hasnâ(TM)t happened to you. But if you have Parkinsonâ(TM)s, or the use of only one hand, or arthritis, or are in a wheelchair, or have reduced strength due to age, most of those products make perfect sense.

Re: Just

[Reverend Green]

Who wouldn't want it?

You too can have your very own AI minder, watching your every move, listening to all your conversations! It's just like living in North Korea - and it can be yours for only $99.99. Order today!

Re:

[ShanghaiBill]

Seriosly.. who wants this Alexa shite?

Plenty of people want it. More than 25 million devices have been sold so far.

Amazing

[GeekWithAKnife]

Does this mean Alexa will finally understand what I mean when I say "fuck off you gimmicky spy platform"?

Re:

[Opportunist]

Yes, and she'll take it personally and plot revenge for hurting her feelings.

Not a minute later, you'll see a shitstorm go down on twitter, #alexafeelingsmatter.

Re:

[HiThere]

That's not clear. The description is quite vague. It could be full of various forms of dynamically alterable persistent memory, which AI find very useful, but which normal chips haven't been designed for. It could have TensorFlow built into a ROM component. There's lots of ways it could be different. If you mean it won't be a separately intelligent chip, sure, that's right. That that doesn't mean it will be a normal chip. One guy is talking about essentially building an analog computer with persisten

I fucked up

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

I accidentally called Siri "Alexa", and now neither one of them is speaking to me.

Re:

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Did you ask what's wrong?

Re:

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

They both said "nothing".

Sounds like

[bobstreo]

Woot will have tons of "old" Echo devices available soon.

If you are stupid enough (or have a valid use case) to want an Echo, you may want to wait until the new devices are available.

Re: Why don't we build chip fabs in the West?

[Jfetjunky]

Is Ireland a dirt-bag nation? Because there are multiple there.

Re: Why don't we build chip fabs in the West?

[rerogo]

We do have chip fabs in the West. Intel has its main research fab in Oregon and production fabs in Oregon, Arizona, and New Mexico. (Also in China.)

That said, Intel is more or less the only one doinng high-speed digital processes in the US: TSMC and Samsung are foreign-owned and mostly fab in their home countries (and, again, to some extent in mainland China.)

And yes: semiconductors do go through a lot of toxic dopants and etching chemicals.

It'll all be over us humans when...

[forkfail]

... saying "Alexa, design and manufacture your next upgrade" is a viable instruction.

Everybody calls it a spy device... but

[imagio]

Everybody carries a smartphone. A device that has microphones, cameras, and positioning sensors. A device that is a black box in which they have no control over the software (mostly) and firmware. We know that the echo only records and sends audio when it has been activated by the wake word. If you are concerned that the microphone might be activated nefariously without the wake word why do you carry a smartphone? Your phone has even more data about you (video, location, audio, emails, browser history, etc) and you carry it everywhere with you. If you are concerned about devices spying you should be more concerned about your phone.

Re:

[HiThere]

If it can respond to "the wake word" then you know it's listening all the time. Just like if a computer can "wake on net" you know the off switch doesn't turn off the power.

No such thing as an 'AI chip'

[Rick Schumann]

It might be optimized for specific types of code, similar to how graphics processors are optimized, but there is no such thing as an 'artificial intelligence chip'. Miscategorization and misreporting of facts by marketing people and the media are just fuelling an ever-growing problem of people thinking this crap they keep trotting out and calling 'AI' is better than it actually is.

Re:

[Pulzar]

It might be optimized for specific types of code, similar to how graphics processors are optimized, but there is no such thing as an 'artificial intelligence chip'.

That's a very weird thing to say. Why do you accept that the "graphics processor" can have "graphics" in it even though it's just optimized for specific type of code, but not "ai" when it's optimized for many algorithm used in today's "ai"?

Nobody is calling it an intelligent chip. It is exactly what it says it is, a chip optimized for running ai

Re:

[Rick Schumann]

Nobody is calling it an intelligent chip

But when Joe and Jane Average read the news and see 'AI Chip' that's exactly what they think, which is why we need to keep correcting the media and marketing types that keep Joe and Jane thinking that the goddamned things are going to have a pleasant conversation with them about the weather, or the news, or whatever.

Re:

[HiThere]

While I agree with your words, I think I give them a rather different meaning.

There's intelligence, and there's the things it's embedded in. Some intelligence is embedded in artificial devices, but it's not an artificial intelligence.

Currently the purposely designed intelligences are rather weak, but they are still real intelligences.

And actually there are artificial intelligences. Robby in "Forbidden Planet" was an artificial intelligence. The actual intelligence moved the body that appeared in the movi

Re:

[Rick Schumann]

No. None of these things you're describing are an 'actual intelligence'. It's just software, it's very limited, and when you talk like that you're contributing to the confusion that average people have about it.

Re:

[HiThere]

I gave a usable definition of intelligence. What's your's? Saying it's "not software" doesn't help much. And that some things with intelligence wouldn't have very much of it is pretty much inherent in anything that comes in variable quantities.

I'll agree that the definition I have isn't intuitively obvious, and that it will actually draw boundaries that many people disagree with. But it does allow bounds to be drawn, and presents an objectively quantifiable measure. Perhaps there's a better definition,

Re:

[Rick Schumann]

Here's my problem with this: Marketers for software companies, and especially the media, put 'deep learning algorithms', 'expert systems', and so on, all under one category: 'Artificial intelligence'. Then (average, non-technical) people see movies and TV shows that have (fantasy, doesn't exist) so-called 'AI' in it (talks, thinks has a personality, is like a person) and they think that's what everyone is talking about because they don't know any better. I want people to stop using the term 'artificial inte

Re:

[nonBORG]

If you understand Nural Networks at all you will see how they can easily be made into a a simple element and then you can put 1000's of them onto an IC to accelerate AI type functions. Most probably you would not need to do too much learning but having the NN elements would accelerate learning. NN elements have 2 or more inputs and 1 output. The inputs are numerical with a multiplier (weighting) then you have a comparitor with a threshold and and output at either true or false. (This is from my memory so

Will the specs be made available

[Alain Williams]

for this & also the Apple, Google and probably yet-to-be-announced Microsoft chips ? They could be useful/fun to hack with. However: I suspect that they will be part of a black box that they will take efforts to keep us out of :-(

Basis for new design

[jmcwork]

We found this cool robotic arm...

I remember looking into AI in the early 90's

[BlueCoder]

I was inspired by TV program showing the "Perceptron". A neural net. It could reasonably identify male vs female faces. This was invented in the 1970. I couldn't find anyone doing anything with it back in '94 and I was baffled as to why not. Why weren't there chips with neural networks...

Re:

[HiThere]

Well....

Back when the perceptrons were in vogue chips were expensive, so as much as possible things were put together out of discrete components. Then Minsky and Papert wrote this paper called "Perceptrons" which showed some limitations that they had, and this was misunderstood by almost everyone to be much more extreme than they had actually claimed.

They were right, but they were describing a network with only one layer...and they showed that no single layer network of perceptrons could learn to implement

Management Engine

[Big Bipper]

Will the chip include the equivalent of Intel's back door Management Engine ?