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."

Intel has shifted its self-driving car efforts into high gear with a $15.3 billion deal to acquire computer vision and collision-avoidance company MobileEye. With the deal, announced Monday, Intel gets its hands on technology for machine learning, data analysis, localization and mapping for driver assistance systems and autonomous driving. Mobileye develops a full package of software and chips designed for use in autonomous cars. The deal is expected to close in nine months and calls for the combined global autonomous driving organization, which will consist of Mobileye and Intel's Automated Driving Group, to be headquartered in Israel and led by Amnon Shashua, Mobileye's co-Founder, chairman and CTO. The acquisition of MobileEye will be merged with Intel technologies like Xeon processors, FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays), 3D Xpoint memory and 5G modems in autonomous cars said Brian Krzanich, Intel's CEO.

Self-driving cars might fill the roads a lot sooner if carmakers can put aside their rivalries and share the data that would teach computers how to drive safely. MobileEye, an Israeli company that supplies advanced computer hardware and software to many carmakers to enable cars to spot objects on the road, is now developing ways to train cars to drive themselves. The effort involves feeding computers huge quantities of driving behavior into a vast, highly realistic simulation, so that they can learn how to drive for themselves. And MobileEye aims to have different customers contribute the data that their vehicles collect. "If you want to leverage many, many cars, you need to leverage as many carmakers as possible," says Amnon Shashua, cofounder and CTO of MobileEye.

The car company announced last week that it would no longer use a vision system provided by MobileEye, an Israeli company that supplies technology to many automakers. This comes a few weeks after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced that it was investigating a fatal accident that occurred while one of Tesla's cars was operating in Autopilot mode, a system designed to enable automated driving under a driver's supervision. It is unclear why Tesla is dropping MobileEye, but one reason may be the emergence of newer approaches to automated driving. MobileEye provides what amounts to an advanced image-recognition system, capable of identifying road signs or obstacles, such as other cars or pedestrians, on the road ahead. The company has said that it uses deep learning, a popular machine-learning technique based on training a many-layered network of simulated neurons to recognize input using a large number of training examples.