"There's a lot of hype in the field," declared Yaser AbuMostafa, a researcher at California Institute of Technology. "The problem is how to achieve generalizable learning, to extend a computer's experience to new fields."
Technology Venture Investors, of Menlo Park, Calif., is backing a new firm, Synaptics Inc., that features the work of Carver Mead and Federico Faggin of Caltech. But venture capitalist Jim Bochnowski admits that "we might be too early. The field might develop more slowly than we expect."
Neural-net computing is based on a design patterned after the human brain, in which each fundamental element is linked to a large number of other elements. But the scale is quite a bit smaller: while each neuron in the brain is connected to about 10,000 others, neural-net computers have so far joined about 100 such elements.
The design contrasts with the better-known parallel processing, which has already reached the ...
