AI enhanced crunching, the future?

[Dirk Broer]

At the moment added AI capacity in any form is just a waste of money and budget, but that might change in the future.
Me personally I think that AI-enhanced crunching is the new ASIC -it is just that none of the projects yet seem to be able to get an app for any NPU, TPU or you-name-it-PU.

And when you want to hop on the AI-bus, how much bang (TOPS) do you get for your buck ($£€¥₩)?

I have some AI 'capable' systems, the first of which was my Odroid-M1. A whopping 0.8 TOPS of INT8! As I bought the 8GB version these were expensive TOPS, and you have to jump through several hooples in order to get the system see the NPU at all, let alone work with it.
I've had more luck with the DSP of my BeagleBone-AI and even with the PRUs of my BeagleBone Black. For the time being my Odroid-M1 is just the utter king of cool with its giant heatsink (100 x 123 x 19 mm) under the Rockchip RK3568, a capable Cortex-A55.

My second AI capable device is my Ryzen 7 8700G CPU, that not only has a decent GPU inside, but a 16 TOPS Xilinx XDNA AI NPU as well.
And though I have installed that feature, the BOINC manager does not see it and not a single BOINC app can work with it either.
As the 8700G CPU/GPU combo performs quite well, I will just wait for this investment to bear fruit in the future.

Now if I want much TOPS, I could buy a Jetson Orin AGX with 64GB that has 275 TOPS, but costs at least €2,419 here. That's only 0.11 TOPS/€!
And Nvidia keeps this TOPS/€ ratio for the lower priced Orin AGX 32 GB and Orin NX 16GB, and gets downright nasty with the cheapest Orins:
only 0.03 TOPS/€ for the nVidia Orin Nano 4 GB of €580!

One does better by buying an AI HAT for ones Raspberry Pi 5: the €125 Raspberry Pi AI kit with Hailo 8 delivers 26 TOPS, that is 0.21 TOPS/€.
Even the cheaper €80 Raspberry Pi AI kit with Hailo 8L, that delivers 'only' 13 TOPS, does 0.16 TOPS/€.

[Megacruncher]

I remain unconvinced by AI. It's basically enormous copying with considerable bluffing.
And importantly nobody is even pretending to be close to artificial self-awareness or artificial volition.

[Dirk Broer]

I do not think that AI enhanced crunching would/should do anything in the direction of artificial self-awareness or artificial volition.
I was more thinking of pre-processing data, or analyzing video fragments -like the bird videos that wildlife@Home (later Citizen Science Grid) did.

Perhaps Seti@Home can be brought into life again, using AI to aid in the search for intelligent life on other planets (now that we've established it isn't going to be found here).
The to be investigated problem 'just' needs to be divided into INT8 proportions in order for AI to plow through it...