AI PCs are in the ascendant, and in addition to basic hardware such as CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs, the most important thing is the ecological implementation of application software and scenarios. AI PCs can only succeed if they truly change people's daily work and life experience from the application perspective and bring real convenience.
As a leader in the industry, Intel not only took the lead in advocating the concept of AI PC, bringing the most transformative Core Ultra processor in history and a large number of AI PC notebooks, leading the PC to fully enter the AI era, but also sparing no effort to invest in ecological expansion.
According to Intel's grand plan, AI PCs will ship about 40 million units in 2024, and by 2025, the market size will exceed 100 million units, entering thousands of households.
In order to enable developers to better use various AI tools, hardware, and software, Intel has made full use of the all-round accumulation in open source, technology, and ecology over the past 20 years to promote the rapid development of AIGC.
目前在全球范围内，已经有超过20种类别的500个AI模型在酷睿Ultra上得到优化，涵盖了本地AI推理的多种类别，包括大语言处理、扩散处理、超分辨率、目标检测、图像分类/分割、计算机视觉等，诸如OpenVINO Model Zoo、Hugging Face、ONNX Model Zoo、PyTorch、Phi-2、Mistral、Llama、Bert、Whisper、Stable Diffusion 1.5等等。
As early as December 16, 2023, the day after the official release of the Core Ultra processor, Intel launched the AI Innovation Application Competition, providing a platform for developers to showcase their creativity and achievements, and help every developer seize the opportunities brought by generative AI.
In the end, the outstanding works of 30 teams stood out and advanced to the finals, and the VidBot team from the individual track and the Panda AI team from the enterprise track won the first prize respectively, each receiving a bonus of 50,000 yuan.
In addition, each track has 2 second prizes, 3 third prizes, and 9 special prizes, with a total prize of 525,000 yuan.
The competition was divided into individual and corporate tracks, with a total of 2,120 teams signing up for the competition and submitting 1,083 entries.
These AI applications are novel, creative, practical, and practical, covering a wide range of fields such as the Internet, education, healthcare, agriculture, construction, law, retail, cultural tourism, industry, energy, games, film and television, and advertising.
This is enough to see everyone's enthusiasm for generative AI, as well as their expectations and optimism about its broad prospects.
In the preliminary stage in February this year, the competition conducted 10 training and community counseling, in March, a special competition for innovative applications, and from April to May, it was an expert counseling and in-depth tuning stage.
In order to help the contestants, but also to help the majority of developers, Intel not only came up with its own OpenVINO, oneAPI, IPEX-LLM and other rich open-source software frameworks and optimization tool chains, but also united the entire ecosystem to provide a wealth of AI large models, involving all aspects of generative AI.
Interestingly, Intel also disclosed the XPU usage for this entry.
The CPU is suitable for general-purpose loads, and has the advantages of fast response and low latency. GPUs have high computing power and high throughput, and the acceleration effect on content creation is obvious. The NPU is designed for sustainably low loads and consumes the lowest power. The three engines have their own characteristics and work together to form the Intel XPU strategy.
At present, CPU+GPU is still the absolute mainstream, and the usage rate far exceeds that of other solutions, and it is gratifying that new applications that use CPU, GPU, and NPU engines at the same time are also emerging.
As the exclusive AI PC partner of the competition, Lenovo provided strong support, including AI PC equipment, application development and ecosystem, prize money, professional judges, etc.
At the same time, Lenovo is comprehensively promoting AI PC products and applications, especially taking the lead in defining the five characteristics of AI PCs: embedded personal large models and natural interactions with users, local heterogeneous AI computing power (CPU/GPU/NPU), personal knowledge base, open AI application ecology, personal data and privacy security protection.
In terms of ecology, Lenovo AI PC has been fully pre-installed with AI applications, and there are ten in the first batch, covering all aspects of experience, including AI painter, AI PPT, document summary, knowledge Q&A, AI map recognition, meeting minutes, smart meeting clone, device tuning, AI replacement, and AI service.
Intel will continue to incubate the contest works through ecological channels, marketing, technical support and other efforts, so that AI can go down to the cloud and benefit everyone.
More importantly, AI PC has just started, and Intel's actions will be one after another, and will continue to help developers enter the new AI market through training and sharing, application promotion, resource docking, market expansion and other measures.
Finally, let's take a look at the introduction of the outstanding works of this AI Innovation Application Competition: