Decoding Intelligence: When Spikes Meet Hyperdimensions
Opening — Why this matters now The AI hardware race is entering a biological phase. As GPUs hit their thermal limits, a quiet counterrevolution is forming around spikes, not tensors. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) — the so-called “third generation” of neural models — mimic the brain’s sparse, asynchronous behavior. But until recently, their energy advantage came at a heavy cost: poor accuracy and complicated decoding. The paper Hyperdimensional Decoding of Spiking Neural Networks by Kinavuidi, Peres, and Rhodes offers a way out — by merging SNNs with Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC) to rethink how neural signals are represented, decoded, and ultimately understood. ...