Intel bets on artificial intelligence, to train 15,000 people in India

Says AI will contribute to the biggest workload in data centres by 2020

Intel is betting on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to drive demand for its electronic chips, for which it is aiming to train 15,000 scientists, developers, engineers and students on AI in India over the next one year.

The company will host 60 courses under its ‘AI Developer Education Program’. These will train people on ways they can adopt AI for better research, testing or even building of products. Intel is looking at India due to the country's large base of technical talent. The country is the third largest global site for AI companies.

“As India undergoes rapid digital transformation, data centres and the intelligence behind the data collected will enable the government and industry to make effective decisions based on algorithms. This means increasing opportunities for using AI in the country,” said Prakash Mallya, managing director at Intel for South Asia.

He says adoption of AI in developing countries would be much faster than in developed nations, as the magnitude of change it will bring will be far larger. Intel wishes to involve the government, academia and hospitals, too.

Research on AI and Machine Learning is already on at all Indian Institutes of Technologies (IITs), the Indian Institute of Science and some private universities. The company is keen to partner with these institutions, to drive adoption of its services and to get the next generation of scientists and technologists trained for using its products and services.

“Our research groups are currently working on implementation of evolutionary algorithms in parallel environments, and using Intel based platforms and software tools to deploy, parallelise and optimise systems,” said Pushpak Bhattacharya, Director at IIT, Patna. Intel says by 2020, AI would contribute to the biggest workload in data centres, as analysis of data becomes ever more important for businesses, governments and academia. Its products reflect this change, becoming more capable in handling tasks on machine learning, computer vision and the like. 

The company says use of AI in sectors such as autonomous driving and the internet of things will create massive amounts of data, which in turn will have to be analysed. Mallya says a million autonomous cars have the capacity to create half as much data as humanity creates as a whole today.