Intel CEO swipes at NVIDIA on AI: 'entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market'

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has some fighting words to NVIDIA and its CUDA standard, where he said: "You know, the entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market".

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Gelsinger claimed that inference technology will be more important than training for AI, just as it launches its new Intel Core Ultra and Intel 5th Gen Xeon "Emerald Rapids" CPUs at its "AI Everywhere" event in New York City. Gelsinger continued: "We think of the CUDA moat as shallow and small. Because the industry is motivated to bring a broader set of technologies for broad training, innovation, data science, et cetera".

Gelsinger used examples like MLIR, Google, and OpenAI, where he said they're moving towards a "Pythonic programming layer" that makes AI training more open.

Gelsinger added: "As inferencing occurs, hey, once you've trained the model... There is no CUDA dependency. It's all about, can you run that model well?" He suggested that with Gaudi 3, shown on stage for the first time, that Intel will be up to the challenge, and will be able to do it as well with Xeon and edge PCs. Not that Intel won't compete in training, but "fundamentally, the inference market is where the game will be at".

"We're going to compete three ways for 100% of the datacenter AI TAM. With our leadership CEOs, leadership accelerators, and as a foundry. Every one of those internal opportunities is available to us: The TPUs, the inferentias, the trainiums, et cetera. We're going to pursue all of those. And we're going to pursue every commercial opportunity as well, with NVIDIA, with AMD, et cetera. We're going to be a foundry player".