Intel and Facebook are working on a new AI chip together.
The announcement came Monday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The chip will help with “inference,” or the process of putting A.I. to work. It could perform tasks such as automatically tagging friends in Facebook photos.
Intel has dominated the market for A.I. inference chips, but it is starting to face stiff competition. The semiconductor and software maker Nvidia recently announced it would bring a competing chip to market, and Amazon has developed a similar chip that it will put to use in its cloud services, depriving Intel of a major customer.
Intel isn’t the only company foregrounding AI at CES:2019. AI is present in products in almost every category of this year’s show, not just the ones featured in the A.I. section. From digital assistants to self-driving cars, A.I. is at the center of almost all forward-looking technologies.
That could be cause for concern in light of a survey by Pew Research showing that 37% of technology experts think A.I. could “lessen human autonomy and agency” by the year 2030. But the acceleration of A.I. could also help protect the privacy of users through the development of programs that can learn from data without seeing it.