Intel CEO on NVIDIA AI GPU dominance: they were 'extraordinarily lucky'

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is really pushing the fighting words against NVIDIA and its utter AI dominance, where he's said that the company got "extraordinarily lucky" with its AI business.

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In a recent chat with MIT, Gelsinger said: "Jensen worked super hard at owning throughput computing, primarily for graphics initially, and then got extraordinarily lucky. They didn't even want to support their first AI project".

The fun didn't stop there because NVIDIA's Vice President of Applied Deep Learning Research, Bryan Catanzaro, who used to work for Intel, tweeted: "I worked at Intel on Larrabee applications in 2007. Then I went to NVIDIA to work on ML in 2008. So I was there at both places at that time and I can say: NVIDIA's dominance didn't come from luck. It came from vision and execution. Which Intel lacked".

• Read more: Intel CEO swipes at NVIDIA on AI: 'entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market'
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He continued, adding: "There were a lot of people at Intel back in 2007 that I worked with that saw both the opportunity and the risk for Intel. Back then NVIDIA was 10X smaller revenues so Intel management thought they would crush NVIDIA with Larrabee. But Intel lacked vision and execution.".

It seems Intel believes that NVIDIA got to this part -- dominating the AI GPU business -- with pure luck, the right time and place and that it had nothing to do with NVIDIA's great strides in the AI business. Considering how well NVIDIA has been doing lately with its AI GPUs, GeForce GPUs, and its stock... Intel should have a little more tact.

Intel believes that if it continued its killed-off Larabee project, which was over 10 years ago now, it would've been in a better position in AI. Intel Larabee was a highly parallel, many-core architecture that the company was working on until Gelsinger originally left Intel, and then rejoined 11 years ago.

Your move, Intel.