Google’s Tensor Processing Unit Pushes Machine Learning, Beats Go Champion

      Artificial intelligence has another notch on its belt against humans. First it was chess, now it’s Go. But the real story here isn’t just a computer that can beat the world champion in humanity’s most strategic game—it’s the tensor processing unit (TPU) and Machine Learning. The TPU is an application-specific chip that Google has created for the specific purpose of accelerating machine learning.

        The company has proven once again that it’s all-in on artificial intelligence and developing machine learning that keeps getting better. The particular computer that beat the Go champion was developed by DeepMind, an AI company Google acquired back in 2014. But the TPU is only a tool for Google’s big picture strategy.

       At the press event in which the Google Pixel smartphone was announced, CEO Sundar Pichai spent nearly half the event talking about the Google Assistant, a conversational, machine learning-powered assistant. What we’re talking about here is computers that can do things beyond what they were explicitly programmed to do. There are plenty of reasons to be afraid of that, but also plenty of reasons to be excited about the possibilities.