Dive Brief:
- Intel announced Thursday it will align all of its artificial intelligence efforts under one group, known as the Artificial Intelligence Products Group (AIPG). AIPG will include resources from various Intel divisions including engineering, labs and software.
- Naveen Rao will lead the new group as vice president and general manager of AIPG. Rao was CEO of Nervana, an AI company Intel purchased last year.
- Intel also plans to create an applied AI research lab, which will serve as the home for AI innovation at Intel and will be "dedicated to pushing the forefronts of computing," Rao said.
Dive Insight:
Intel really wants to be the leader in AI, though it will face stiff competition from IBM and others. Creating AIPG is about coordinating all of Intel’s AI efforts in one place to align both focus and resources across the organization. Among those efforts, Intel wants to create a set of AI standards to help make AI accessible to more groups.
Intel will base its AI work on the Nervana platform, according to Rao, which the company bought last summer specifically to help it advance its AI capabilities.
The group is being given a lot of responsibility, tasked with growing AI capabilities at the hardware and software level. Reporting directly to Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, as Forbes notes, the new group will help the company's advanced computing efforts, another move away from the slowing PC market.
The reorganization comes just after Intel's $15.3 billion purchase of Mobileye, a computer vision and machine learning specialist, which will allow the company to move into the autonomous vehicles space. That is the latest in a line of high-profile purchases to boost the company's AI profile, the Motley Fool reports. It also gives Intel the ability to compete with it's major competitor NVIDIA in AI applications.
