Next month the AI Hardware Summit returns to the Bay Area, bringing AI technologists and end users together to share ideas and get up to speed on all the latest AI hardware developments. The event – which takes place September 13-15, 2022, at the Santa Clara Marriott, Calif. – will be co-located with the Edge AI Summit. Both events are organized by Kisaco Research, which launched the inaugural AI Hardware Summit in 2018.

One of the participants who has been there from the beginning is Karl Freund, founder and principal analyst at Cambrian AI Research. In an interview with HPCwire and EnterpriseAI, Freund provides a preview of what attendees can expect and offers advance highlights of his scheduled talk, “The Landscape of AI Acceleration: Annual Survey of the Last Year of Innovations from the World of Semiconductors, Systems and Design Tools.”

“To me, if you’re developing AI, a machine learning platform, you want to make sure you’re using the best hardware you can get your hands on. This is the best place to go to find out what’s coming and to find out what other people are doing. And learn from them, learn from what’s working and perhaps what’s not,” Freund shared.

A number of other returning speakers will also be giving talks this year: Lip-Bu Tan, executive chairman at Cadence; Kunle Olukotun, co-founder and chief technologist at SambaNova Systems; Andrew Feldman, founder and CEO of Cerebras Systems; and many more.

Keynotes and More

On Wednesday, the luminary keynote will be presented by Meta engineers Alexis Black Bjorlin, vice president, infrastructure hardware, and Lin Qiao, senior director, engineering. Their session is titled, “Co-Designing an Accelerated Compute Platform at Scale for AI Research and Infrastructure.”

On Thursday, Rashid Attar, head of engineering, cloud/edge AI inference accelerators at Qualcomm, opens the day with his keynote, which will cover chip design and AI at the edge.

The event’s closing keynote will be delivered by Sassine Ghazi, president and COO of Synopsys. In his presentation, “Enter the Era of Autonomous Design: Personalizing Chips for 1,000X More Powerful AI Compute,” Ghazi will discuss strategies for using machine learning techniques to reduce design time and design risk.

In addition to participation from Meta, Qualcomm, Cadence and Synopsys, there will be talks from Alibaba, AMD, Atos, Graphcore, HuggingFace, MemVerge, Microsoft, SambaNova, Siemens, and many others.

A Meet & Greet takes place Tuesday from 4-7pm during which DeepMind Chief Business Operator Colin Murdoch will be interviewed by Cade Metz of the NYTimes. AI Hardware Summit and Edge AI Summit attendees are invited to reconnect with peers, make new acquaintances and discuss the state of machine learning in the datacenter and at the edge. A guest speaker announcement is forthcoming.

Freund maintains that AI will be pervasive. “It will be in every electronic product we buy and sell and use, from toys to automobiles,” he said, “And the ability to make AI useful depends on really good engineers, really good AI modelers, data scientists, as well as the hardware. But all that will be for naught if you’re not running it on efficient hardware because you can’t afford it. So this is all about making AI pervasive and affordable and – people overuse the term – but democratizing AI is still a goal. It’s not where we are, but it’s gonna take a lot of work to get there.”