Analog computing is getting some hypeBickley explained that when, say, brute-force natural-language AI systems distill millions of words from the internet, the process is insanely power hungry. The human brain runs on a small amount of electricity, he said, about 20 watts. (That’s the same as a light bulb.) “Yet if we try to do the same thing with digital computers, it takes megawatts.” For that kind of application, digital is “not going to work. It’s not a smart way to do it.”
It's a little sad that ML is driving this, but it does feel like digital progress is a bit stuck.