Flinging brightly coloured objects around a screen at high speed is not what computers’ central processing units were designed for. So manufacturers of arcade machines invented the graphics-processing unit (gpu), a set of circuits to handle video games’ visuals in parallel to the work done by the central processor. The gpu’s ability to speed up complex tasks has since found wider uses: video editing, cryptocurrency mining and, most recently, the training of artificial intelligence.
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ai is now disrupting the industry that helped bring it
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