Intel OpenVINO: Funny Name, Great Strategy

Over the last several years, Intel has acquired four companies to go after the AI market: Nervana, Movidius, MobileEye, and Altera. Now the company has announced a new software strategy to unify these offerings for the application developer. While there is still much work to be done, Intel's inference strategy looks pretty solid and should pave the way for significant growth to come in AI. Figure 1: The Intel OpenVINO platform supports common programming models and the underlying libraries that turn high-level code into optimized instructions for specific hardware platforms including CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and Movidius VPUs. The new strategy is named "OpenVINO," which stands for Open Visual Inferencing and Neural Network Optimization. One can give Intel a pass for dropping an "N," but in my world, VINO means WINE, without any ambiguity. I would have loved to be present at the meeting where Intel decided on the branding and would have suggested something like OpenVIA, for "Open Visual Inference Acceleration."