Former Intel Corp. executives Naveen Rao and Hanlin Tang have gotten back into the startup game, announcing the launch of a new company called MosaicML today that promises to optimize machine learning. MosaicML is exiting stealth mode armed with $37 million in funding round led by Lux Capital DCVC, Future Ventures, Playground Global, AME, Correlation, E14 and a few angel investors. Rao (pictured, far left) told Reuters he's aiming to revolutionize machine learning model training by offering his company's expertise and techniques "as-a-service" to organizations looking to develop extremely complex artificial intelligence models. The company's stated mission is to help its customers and the AI community improve prediction accuracy, lower costs and save time. MosaicML will do that by providing tools that make more efficient training methods available to data scientists. The MosaicML Explorer can help developers to explore and understand the potential tradeoffs among time, performance and costs associated with different cloud services and hardware options for training machine learning models.

During a wide-ranging discussion at Amazon's re:MARS conference in Las Vegas, Naveen Rao, corporate vice president and general manager of AI at Intel, spoke about machine learning's rapid progress and the fields it might transform, in addition to the steps he believes must be taken to ensure it's not abused. Rao compared the advent of modern AI approaches with the iPhone. Like the iPhone, he said, machine learning -- a technique underlying systems from Amazon's Alexa to Google Lens -- wasn't the first form of AI, but it was nonetheless "exciting" and "consequential." He characterizes the coming AI revolution as the single largest transition the human species has ever encountered. "Few people anticipated the big-picture changes that smartphones would bring. No one foresaw that smartphones could make our work day substantially longer because we'd never get away from email," he said.

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The following is an opinion editorial provided by Naveen Rao of Intel Corporation. Most people agree that artificial intelligence (AI) will transform modern society in positive ways. From autonomous cars that will save thousands of lives, to data analytics programs that may finally discover a cure for cancer, to machines that give voice to those who can't speak, AI will be known as one of the most revolutionary innovations of mankind. But this fantastic future is a long way off, and the path to get us there is still under construction. Never before has society undertaken such a significant transformation so deliberately, and no blueprints exist to guide us.

Intel held its inaugural Artificial Intelligence (AI) Developers Conference in San Francisco on May 23-24th, presenting its leadership, technologies, and customers to a capacity audience of some 800 AI geeks and media. The company now has a rich portfolio of AI technologies, after acquiring Movidius and MobileEye for real-time processing, Altera for reprogrammable FPGA acceleration hardware, and Nervana for the training workloads currently served by NVIDIA GPUs. Intel's primary focus on inference processing for the production use of trained neural networks is a sound strategy, as inference is likely to become a much larger market that the training segment over the next few years. While Intel does not yet have a brawny ASIC in its portfolio to build AI networks, it can create a sizable position in inference, alongside companies such as Apple, Qualcomm, Xilinx, and NVIDIA. That being said, Intel has not abandoned the AI training market, where NVIDIA is enjoying tremendous success with a $3B run rate.

O'Reilly and Intel Nervana are presenting the Artificial Intelligence Conference in San Francisco, September 17-20, 2017. Subscribe to the O'Reilly Data Show Podcast to explore the opportunities and techniques driving big data, data science, and AI. Find us on Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS. In this episode of the Data Show, I speak with Naveen Rao, VP and GM of the Artificial Intelligence Products Group at Intel. In an earlier episode, we learned that scaling current deep learning models requires innovations in both software and hardware.

As we have been writing for a while now, artificial intelligence will transform pretty much everything we do in our lives in the next five years. AI is actually in use today helping us to match faces, identify photos, videos, the spoken word, doing our taxes, improving collaboration, and even help in healthcare diagnosis, and soon, will help drive our cars and trucks for us. While AI has been around for a while, the big breakthrough was machine learning using deep neural networks that actually got smarter with more information you threw at it. GPUs, with NVIDIA being the biggest recent beneficiary, have become the most recent standard for cutting edge deep neural network training, and inference today is spread across CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, ASICs and even DSPs. AI is a quick moving target and I think it's unwise to think the engines today will be static in the future.

Today Intel announced that the company will align its AI efforts into a single organization called the Artificial Intelligence Products Group. The group will be led by Naveen Rao, formerly CEO of Nervana, which Intel acquired last year. Intel sees the huge potential in AI and are moving mountains to take full advantage of it," said Patrick Moorhead from Moor Insights & Strategy. "They have acquired Altera, Nervana Systems and other IP, need to connect to their home-grown IP and now it's time to accelerate the delivery of it. That's where today's organization comes in play, a centralized organization, reporting directly to CEO Brian Krzanich, to make that happen.

As we have been writing for a while now, artificial intelligence will transform pretty much everything we do in our lives in the next five years. AI is actually in use today helping us to match faces, identify photos, videos, the spoken word, doing our taxes, improving collaboration, and even help in healthcare diagnosis, and soon, will help drive our cars and trucks for us. While AI has been around for a while, the big breakthrough was machine learning using deep neural networks that actually got smarter with more information you threw at it. GPUs, with NVIDIA being the biggest recent beneficiary, have become the most recent standard for cutting edge deep neural network training, and inference today is spread across CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, ASICs and even DSPs. AI is a quick moving target and I think it's unwise to think the engines today will be static in the future.

On the day after Intel announced its acquisition of San Diego machine learning startup Nervana Systems, investor Steve Jurvetson told me he was feeling a sense of satisfaction about a call he made three years ago, and how it has been playing out. In a 2013 panel discussion at Silicon Valley's Churchill Club, the DFJ partner said "machine learning" was his pick as the most important tech trend to watch for the next three to five years. "Just about anything you've heard [about] at Google that sounds interesting and new is based on machine learning," Jurvetson said at the time. "Everywhere, technology is starting to percolate into an otherwise prosaic, non-tech industry--apply big data, apply machine learning--and revolutionize it." Just over a year later, Jurvetson led the Series A round of venture funding for Nervana Systems.