Having the relatively unique experience of trying to sell an alternative deep learning stack, and then selling that company to Intel, color me skeptical. AMA.
Having worked for a deep learning startup which was acquired by Intel, I am likewise skeptical.
(Do we know each other?)
Hey! Yep, this is Choong.
Well, can you elaborate on what exactly you observed/felt from Intel that makes you skeptical about these claims?
Across the semi industry the prevailing attitude is that the chip is the important part and software is a nice add-on that you build as a one-off or that "the community" will support. This has changed much more slowly than I thought it would given NVIDIA's demonstration of what is possible when software is viewed as a core part of the product. Claiming the CUDA moat is weak suggests that it's business as usual over there.
Does the solution lie in genuinely investing in a CUDA alternative?
In my opinion the main issues are a layer up from that, it's more of a customer experience and brand building exercise to solve by actually improving the tools people use. Today NVIDIA is the default if you want to get work done and not have a lot of tooling issues. Nobody is going to forego that experience to work with flaky slow products from a late number three entrant but that's more or less the perception today. What's weird is they actually have the high ground in an important area: They ship more GPUs than just about everyone and have for a long time, their integrated graphics drivers are pretty good (virtualization!), and they have a deep bench of performance engineering talent. NVIDIA structurally has no way to reach the same volume. Intel with some investment of time could be the most productive platform for AI developers but it would take creativity that is hard in a big company and acknowledging that in that effort they're starting as a distant #3.