Fast Forward: Why Intel's Diane Bryant Isn't Afraid Of AI

Fast Forward is a series of conversations with tech leaders hosted by Dan Costa, PCMag’s Editor-in-Chief. Diane Bryant is EVP and General Manager of Intel’s Data Center Group. She and Dan spoke about artificial intelligence.

Dan Costa: Most people think data centers are kind of boring, but you can do incredible things with them. It’s also the most profitable division inside of Intel. People think of Intel as a chip company, but the data center business has exploded in recent years, and part of that is driving this AI revolution.

Diane Bryant: Right. Absolutely. The artificial intelligence… discipline was founded in 1956, so we’re talking a long time ago. And so it’s crazy to now think about how that area has simply exploded and is transforming literally all businesses. And it’ll transform the way you and I engage with the world. This has all just happened really in the 2010s; it’s just really taken off.

Artificial intelligence can be difficult to define. How do you define it?

Artificial intelligence is a computer system with humanlike capabilities, so the ability to think and predict, to learn and predict. That’s the definition of it. You say, ‘Well it sounds pretty simple, so why did it take from 1956 to now?’ The issue is in order for a computer system to be able to learn and to demonstrate some of those human attributes of learning and predicting an event, you have to feed it massive, massive amounts of data and compute on these very, very large models. It’s going to take a lot of information for a computer system to draw a conclusion. Historically, there just has not been the affordable compute capacity, and storage capacity, and network bandwidth capacity to actually process that magnitude of information.