'A.I. is still rather nascent,' says Intel executive Diane Bryant

Artificial intelligence (A.I.) dates back to the 1950s, when the term was coined. But the way Intel sees it, the field is not old -- it represents a growth opportunity for the chipmaker. Last week Intel made a bold move and acquired Nervana, one of the preeminent startups in deep learning, a type of A.I. that involves training artificial neural networks on data and then getting them to make inferences on new data. Today, when Intel announced a new generation of Xeon Phi server chips, the emphasis was on their ability to handle A.I. workloads. In previous years, Xeon Phi has been geared toward the high-performance computing market.