AI startups have discovered there’s value to partnering with tech giants like Intel, Google, and IBM. Entrepreneurs bring the domain expertise, ingenuity, and passion, while large enterprises provide the unparalleled compute and storage capabilities critical to building modern AI systems.
“Ninety percent of the world’s supercomputers run on Intel technology,” Diane Bryant, who leads Intel’s Data Center Group, told me at SXSW. “And 95 percent of artificial intelligence solutions run on Intel Xeon and Xeon Phi processors.”
Graphics processing units (GPUs), once popular mainly with gamers chasing visual performance, inside computers represent images as matrices. Turns out the deep neural nets that power our current AI craze also depend heavily on matrix operations, making GPUs suddenly very useful for AI research.