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From: rbowman <bowman@montana.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Well DUH ! AI People Finally Realize They Can Ditch Most
 Floating-Point for Big Ints
Date: 15 Oct 2024 19:20:32 GMT
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On Tue, 15 Oct 2024 02:43:08 -0400, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

>    The question is how EXACT the precision HAS to be for most "AI" uses.
>    Might be safe to throw away a few decimal points at the bottom.

It's usually referred to as 'machine learning' rather than AI but when you 
look at TinyML on edge devices doing image recognition, wake word 
processing, and other tasks it's impressive how much you can throw away 
and still get a reasonable quality of results.

https://www.tinyml.org/

This goes back to the slide rule days. Sure, you could whip out your book 
of six place tables and get seemingly more accurate results but did all 
those decimal places mean anything in the real world? Computers took the 
pain out of calculations but also tended to avoid the questions of 'what 
does this really mean in the real world'.