Artificial intelligence, or machine learning as it's also referred to, is starting to touch more products we use on a daily basis. Take Google's new Photos product as an example. Using AI, Google scans photos uploaded to your device and identifies objects in the picture. Then it makes that data searchable by the user.

It's impressive tech, but one that undoubtedly requires massive computing power to accomplish. A fact that tips the AI scales in favor of large companies with deep pockets to cover infrastructure costs. Sentient, however, is a small company that says it's figured out a way to create a vast computing system capable of scaling up to millions of cores at a lower cost.

How? By taking advantage of idle machines within data centers, and connecting them as if they were a single machine.