Let the AI benchmarking wars begin. Today, a diverse group from academia and industry – Google, Baidu, Intel, AMD, Harvard, and Stanford among them – released MLPerf, a nascent benchmarking tool "for measuring the speed of machine learning software and hardware." Arrival of MLPerf follows what has been a smattering of ad hoc AI performance comparisons trickling to market. Today Intel posted a blog with data showing for select machine translation using RNNs "the Intel Xeon Scalable processor outperforms NVidia V100 by 4x on the AWS Sockeye Neural Machine Translation model." For quite some time there has been vigorous discussion around the need for meaningful AI benchmarks with proponents suggesting that the lack of meaningful benchmark tools has restrained AI adoption.