It is virtually impossible to watch a news program and not hear something about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it will affect all our lives. This is particularly true if you are watching a financial news channel.

Recently there has been a lot of news about the incredible financial successes of a Silicon Valley chipmaker, Nvidia, and their Graphic Processing Units (GPU).

It is important to understand how AI, GPUs, and Nvidia are going to affect the lift industry. There are many forms of AI. However, there are two fields of AI that can benefit from the use of GPUs: Machine Vision and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). Nvidia is considered to be the leading producer of GPUs for industrial, non-PC and AI applications.

A GPU is a computer chip that has been developed to process graphic data. When most people think of graphics processing, they usually think of computer gaming or CAD (Computer Aided Design). Those are exactly the markets for which GPUs were designed. California-based Nvidia, founded in 1993, started developing chips for the gaming market.

At some point it was discovered that GPUs were hundreds of times faster than CPUs at processing the complex algorithms used in AI. This is particularly true of Artificial Neural Networks.