Intel Aligns its AI Efforts into a Single Organization

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Naveen Rao is vice president and general manager of the Artificial Intelligence Products Group at Intel Corporation

Today Intel announced that the company will align its AI efforts into a single organization called the Artificial Intelligence Products Group. The group will be led by Naveen Rao, formerly CEO of Nervana, which Intel acquired last year.

Intel sees the huge potential in AI and are moving mountains to take full advantage of it,” said Patrick Moorhead from Moor Insights & Strategy. “They have acquired Altera, Nervana Systems and other IP, need to connect to their home-grown IP and now it’s time to accelerate the delivery of it. That’s where today’s organization comes in play, a centralized organization, reporting directly to CEO Brian Krzanich, to make that happen. This is classic organizational strategy, accelerating delivery by organizing a cross-product group directly reporting to the CEO.”

According to Rao, Artificial Intelligence is changing the world around us and will bring new capabilities to everything from smart factories to drones to sports to health care and to driverless cars. He sees data as the common thread across these applications, and the strategy is to make Intel the driving force of the data revolution across every industry.

“As a data company, it is imperative that we deliver solutions that create, use and analyze the massive amounts of data that are generated each and every minute. Data inference, or finding useful structure in data, may indeed be the largest computational problem of our time. That is why AI is so important to Intel. It is also why we are announcing that Intel is aligning its AI efforts under me, in a single cross-Intel organization: the Artificial Intelligence Products Group (AIPG). Just as Intel has done in previous waves of computational trends, such as personal and cloud computing, Intel intends to rally the industry around a set of standards for AI that ultimately brings down costs and makes AI more accessible to more people – not only institutions, governments and large companies, as it is today. This organization is about aligning our focus. The new organization will align resources from across the company to include engineering, labs, software and more as we build on our current leading AI portfolio: the Intel Nervana platform, a full-stack of hardware and software AI offerings that our customers are looking for from us.”

Rao will also lead the development of an applied AI research lab dedicated to “pushing the forefronts of computing.”

We will be exploring novel architectural and algorithmic approaches to inform future generations of AI. This includes a range of solutions from the data center to edge devices, and from training to inference – all designed to enable Intel and its customers to innovate faster. This will be the home for AI innovation at Intel.

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