On the first day of CES 2018, chip maker Intel has announced a host of partnerships and new innovations aimed to enhance the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in sports, automobiles, Hollywood and computing. During his keynote address, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich showcased company's first autonomous vehicle of 100-car test fleet, informed that BMW, Nissan, and Volkswagen are moving their Mobileye-based mapping design to actual deployments and announced a collaborations with SAIC Motor and NavInfo to extend crowdsourced map building to China.
“Data is going to introduce social and economic changes that we see perhaps once or twice in a century,” Krzanich said. “We not only find data everywhere today, but it will be the creative force behind the innovations of the future. Data is going to redefine how we experience life – in our work, in our homes, how we travel, and how we enjoy sports and entertainment,” he added.
In autonomous driving, Intel said that 2 million vehicles from BMW, Nissan and Volkswagen will use Mobileye Road Experience Management (REM) technology to crowdsource data to build and rapidly update low-cost, scalable high-definition maps throughout this year.
For the China market, Intel disclosed two partnerships with leading automotive manufacturer SAIC Motor and digital mapping company NavInfo. In addition, SAIC will develop Level 3, 4 and 5 cars in China based on Mobileye technology. Levels are assigned based on capacity for autonomy – a Level 4 vehicle can drive itself almost exclusively without any human interaction, and a Level 5 vehicle can drive itself without human interaction on any road, said Intel.
Intel also provided details about the company's new automated driving platform, which combines automotive-grade Intel Atom processors with Mobileye EyeQ5 chips to deliver a platform with calability and versatility for L3 (Level 3) to L5 (Level 5) autonomous driving.
Intel said it is partnering with Ferrari North America to bring the power of AI to the Ferrari Challenge North America Series that will take place on six courses in the U.S. this year. The Ferrari Challenge broadcast will use the processing power of Intel Xeon processors and the neonTM framework for deep learning not only to transcode, identify objects and events, and stream the experience to viewers online, but also to mine the resulting data for further insights for drivers and fans, said chip maker.
For Hollywood, Intel announced the debut of Intel Studios, a newly constructed, studio dedicated to the production of large-scale, volumetric content – using Intel True View technology – that Intel claims, will create new forms of visual storytelling with and without VR. Paramount Pictures is the first major Hollywood studio to explore this technology.
In sports, Intel said, it will enable the largest scale virtual reality event to date with the Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018 using Intel True VR technology. Intel, together with the official Rights Holding Broadcasters, will capture 30 Olympic events, with both live and video-on-demand content available. This marks the first-ever live virtual reality broadcast of the Olympic Winter Games and will be available in the U.S. via a forthcoming NBC Sports VR app.
The US-based firm also update that Intel's neuromorphic research prototype chip – Loih – is now fully functioning and will be shared with research partners this year. On its efforts to develop a quantum computing system, Intel said it has shipped its first 49-qubit quantum computing test chip – Tangle Lake – to research partner QuTech.
