Intel Unveils Strategy for State-of-the-Art Artificial Intelligence

[btarunr]

Intel Corporation today announced a range of new products, technologies and investments from the edge to the data center to help expand and accelerate the growth of artificial intelligence (AI). Intel sees AI transforming the way businesses operate and how people engage with the world. Intel is assembling the broadest set of technology options to drive AI capabilities in everything from smart factories and drones to sports, fraud detection and autonomous cars.

At an industry gathering led by Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, Intel shared how both the promise and complexities of AI require an extensive set of leading technologies to choose from and an ecosystem that can scale beyond early adopters. As algorithms become complex and required data sets grow, Krzanich said Intel has the assets and know-how required to drive this computing transformation. In a blog Krzanich said: "Intel is uniquely capable of enabling and accelerating the promise of AI. Intel is committed to AI and is making major investments in technology and developer resources to advance AI for business and society."



Intel's Robust AI Platform
Intel announced plans to usher in the industry's most comprehensive portfolio for AI - the Intel Nervana platform. Built for speed and ease of use, the Intel Nervana portfolio is the foundation for highly optimized AI solutions, enabling more data professionals to solve the world's biggest challenges on industry standard technology.

Today, Intel powers 97 percent of data center servers running AI workloads and offers the most flexible, yet performance-optimized, portfolio of solutions. This includes Intel Xeon processors and Intel Xeon Phi processors to more workload-optimized accelerators, including FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) and the technology innovations acquired from Nervana.

Intel also provided details of where the breakthrough technology from Nervana will be integrated into the product roadmap. Intel will test first silicon (code-named "Lake Crest") in the first half of 2017 and will make it available to key customers later in the year. In addition, Intel announced a new product (code-named "Knights Crest") on the roadmap that tightly integrates best-in-class Intel Xeon processors with the technology from Nervana. Lake Crest is optimized specifically for neural networks to deliver the highest performance for deep learning and offers unprecedented compute density with a high-bandwidth interconnect.

"We expect the Intel Nervana platform to produce breakthrough performance and dramatic reductions in the time to train complex neural networks," said Diane Bryant, executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group at Intel. "Before the end of the decade, Intel will deliver a 100-fold increase in performance that will turbocharge the pace of innovation in the emerging deep learning space."

Bryant also announced that Intel expects the next generation of Intel Xeon Phi processors (code-named "Knights Mill") will deliver up to 4x better performance than the previous generation for deep learning and will be available in 2017. In addition, Intel announced it is shipping a preliminary version of the next generation of Intel Xeon processors (code-named "Skylake") to select cloud service providers. With AVX-512, an integrated acceleration advancement, these Intel Xeon processors will significantly boost the performance of inference for machine learning workloads. Additional capabilities and configurations will be available when the platform family launches in mid-2017 to meet the full breadth of customer segments and requirements.

Enabling AI Everywhere and Cloud Alliance with Google
Aside from silicon, Intel highlighted other AI assets, including Intel Saffron Technology, a leading solution for customers looking for business insights. The Saffron Technology platform leverages memory-based reasoning techniques and transparent analysis of heterogeneous data. This technology is also particularly well-suited to small devices, making intelligent local analytics possible across IoT and helping advance state-of the-art collaborative AI.
To simplify deployment everywhere, Intel also delivers common, intelligent APIs that extend across Intel's distributed portfolio of processors from edge to cloud, as well as embedded technologies such as Intel RealSense cameras and Movidius vision processing units (VPUs).

Intel and Google announced a strategic alliance to help enterprise IT deliver an open, flexible and secure multi-cloud infrastructure for their businesses. The collaboration includes technology integrations focused on Kubernetes* (containers), machine learning, security and IoT.

To further AI research and strategy, Intel announced the formation of the Intel Nervana AI board, which will feature leading industry and academic thought leaders. Intel announced four founding members: Yoshua Bengio (University of Montreal), Bruno Olshausen (UC Berkeley), Jan Rabaey (UC Berkeley) and Ron Dror (Stanford University).

Additionally, Intel is working to make AI truly accessible. To help accomplish this, Intel has introduced the Intel Nervana AI Academy for broad developer access to training and tools. Intel also introduced the Intel Nervana Graph Compiler to accelerate deep learning frameworks on Intel silicon.
In conjunction with the AI Academy, Intel announced a partnership with global leading education provider Coursera to provide a series of AI online courses to the academic community. Intel also launched a Kaggle Competition (coming in January) jointly with Mobile ODT where the academic community can put their AI skills to the test to solve real-world socioeconomic problems, such as early detection for cervical cancer in developing countries through the use of AI for soft tissue imaging.

"Intel can offer crucial technologies to drive the AI revolution, but ultimately we must work together as an industry - and as a society - to achieve the ultimate potential of AI," said Doug Fisher, senior vice president and general manager of the Software and Services Group at Intel.

With the addition of the new edge and data center products, as well as the enablement programs, Intel has the full complement of technologies and ecosystem reach required to deliver the scale and promise of AI for everyone.

AI for the Betterment of Society
Lastly, Intel showcased some of the initiatives the company is investing in and partnering with to help maximize the positive impact of AI on the world. They include:

• Intel is committing $25 million to the Broad Institute to drive high-performance computing for genomics analytics. Through a five-year collaboration, researchers and software engineers at the Intel-Broad Center for Genomic Data Engineering will build, optimize and widely share new tools and infrastructure that will help scientists integrate and process genomic data. The project aims to optimize best practices in hardware and software for genome analytics to make it possible to access and use research data sets that reside on private, public and hybrid clouds.
• Intel is a founding partner of Hack Harassment, a cooperative effort with the mission of reducing the prevalence and severity of online harassment. The initiative is evaluating AI technology as a tool in this effort and is working to develop an intelligent algorithm to detect and deter online harassment. Over time, this capability will be released as an open source API that can be used in a variety of applications.
• Intel is also a key partner of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), a nonprofit whose mission is to help find missing children, reduce child sexual exploitation and prevent child victimization. Intel is providing AI technology and advising the center with the goal of accelerating the critical work of NCMEC's analysts to respond to reports of child sexual exploitation.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Caring1]

AI for the Betterment of Society

People will believe that if they repeat it often enough.

 

[Steevo]

Swedish Anti-Troll server, powered by Intel

 

[R-T-B]

People will believe that if they repeat it often enough.

I take it you've been watching a lot of hollywood flicks as of late?

At least in it's present state, AI is harmless and can ONLY help humanity.

 

[FierceRed]

"Congratulations Mrs. Connor, it's a girl. What will you name her?"

"Sarah. Welcome to life my little Sarah..."

 

[X828]

Skynet..... Skylake.... Hmmm

 

[Raevenlord]

The AI computational field is somewhere AMD simply can't compete now, and probably won't ever be able to. Which is a shame, since it's bound to be one of the more lucrative markets in recent times.

Intel, however, has seemingly been making all the right moves by investing heavily into it, and its acquisition of Altera was an extraordinarily timely move.

If ever we do get a Cortana model AI, her boot-up sequence will include Intel's audio cues

 

[Prima.Vera]

My guess is that TRUE A.I. won't be with us for another 100-200 years at least. There is too much processing power required, and is not only the hardware, but some revolutionary software to manage that, also needs to be created. Forget Hollywood crap, creating a synthetic self sentient machine is not near close into being achieved.

 

[GC_PaNzerFIN]

My guess is that TRUE A.I. won't be with us for another 100-200 years at least. There is too much processing power required, and is not only the hardware, but some revolutionary software to manage that, also needs to be created. Forget Hollywood crap, creating a synthetic self sentient machine is not near close into being achieved.

That is the traditional safe and slow way. Throw at it long enough and it will happen, but that does not exclude the possibility that someone, somewhere, who does not play by traditional ways makes it happen by accident. 100 years is a looong time. How many things would you have believed to be possible if you lived 100 years ago, that we these days take as granted?

 

[Frick]

My guess is that TRUE A.I. won't be with us for another 100-200 years at least. There is too much processing power required, and is not only the hardware, but some revolutionary software to manage that, also needs to be created. Forget Hollywood crap, creating a synthetic self sentient machine is not near close into being achieved.

I do not believe it can be achieved at all. We might come close to something that looks intelligent if it has sufficent data and capabilities to shuffle through it quick enough.

Speaking of AMD btw:
Google taps AMD for machine learning in the cloud

http://www.forbes.com/sites/aaronti...or-accelerating-machine-learning-in-the-cloud

 

[Prima.Vera]

I do not believe it can be achieved at all. We might come close to something that looks intelligent if it has sufficent data and capabilities to shuffle through it quick enough.

Speaking of AMD btw:
Google taps AMD for machine learning in the cloud

http://www.forbes.com/sites/aaronti...or-accelerating-machine-learning-in-the-cloud

There has to be a revolution in compute processing power, in order to achieve something similar to this:
"The average human brain has about 100 billion neurons (or nerve cells) and many more neuroglia (or glial cells) which serve to support and protect the neurons (although see the end of this page for more information on glial cells). Each neuron may be connected to up to 10,000 other neurons, passing signals to each other via as many as 1,000 trillion synaptic connections, equivalent by some estimates to a computer with a 1 trillion bit per second processor."
http://www.human-memory.net/brain_neurons.html
But by the look on how CPU industry is moving from slow to very slow developement, this doesn't look achievable in the next 100 years.

 

[AsRock]

My guess is that TRUE A.I. won't be with us for another 100-200 years at least. There is too much processing power required, and is not only the hardware, but some revolutionary software to manage that, also needs to be created. Forget Hollywood crap, creating a synthetic self sentient machine is not near close into being achieved.

There is actual rules to having AI. So legally speaking a TRUE AI will never be.