 SiliconANGLE Media presents The Cube. Covering Alibaba Cloud's annual conference. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier. Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Wikibon on The Cube for our exclusive coverage in Hangzhou, China for Alibaba Cloud Conference here. It's a cloud computing conference. The entire city is a cloud. We're here at the Intel booth with Peter Chen who's the general manager of products and technology for data center group sales of Intel Corporation. Peter, AI is the hottest topic, IoT, Alibaba Cloud having a huge event here mixing kind of a cultural shift, generational shift, young developers. Yeah, definitely lots of crowd and you can see people surrounding us, right? So artificial intelligence, definitely it's a hot war here in China over the past 12 months. Everybody's trying to figure out what's going on, how can they really use them? So we're very excited as well to really partner with Alibaba to really explore some of the potentials. I had a chance to speak with some of the Alibaba executives and I'll see strategic partnership with Intel, pretty strategic and it matters what's inside the cloud and that's kind of, but it's not an Intel inside like a PC, the AI is showing that there's a little bit of an Intel on everything from IoT, industrial IoT to data center. I mean it's a range of technology that's powering a new kind of software. This is where AI is shining and we're seeing that with machine learning and as data-driven technology. So I got to ask you, what is the view from Intel on AI? Obviously we see the commercials, we see the technology from Intel, how does that translate to your view on AI? What's the view? So essentially today's AI artificial intelligence is powered by three vectors, the amount of data, the new algorithms and lastly the compute power. And Intel has historically been the leader of creating compute. So for the past many years, it has always been generating new compute powers into the cloud and data centers as well as PCs. But going forward as we look at applying AI to different usages like autonomous driving, for example, you cannot expect everything to be done just at a cloud because we need the real data to be inputted from a car, for instance, or the cameras or the sensors. So we do definitely see a need of actually faster processors at the edge as well. They continue to bring the data back into the cloud so that they have an autonomous feedback loop to make sure that we have the right decision making. Yeah, and so cloud drives this, right? So it's not just cloud though, it's software. I mean, there's exponential growth and open source software is causing a renaissance in the developer community. You're seeing it here in China, a lot of young demographics here. Software and data is tsunami going on. You need compute power. Yes, yes. I think Intel, everybody knows Intel is a hardware company, but we do have a very large effort on engaging a software ecosystem, right? From old days on engaging Linux, the cloud different software stack and working with the CSPs like Alibaba in China, right? To really make sure they can create and write a new latest software AI framework and making the most, taking the most advantage of a hardware platform as well. So that's something that we've been very focusing on. And one of the themes here is the IoT for traffic and China obviously, if you've been here, you know it's kind of congested, but Alibaba's giving a lot of talks on how they're using data in this cloud city for traffic, which is an example of IoT, internet of things, but applied to the real world. That's where the AI kind of connects with the data. Is that kind of where it's going? Yeah, so I think this is a great application that you just mentioned, right? And Alibaba calls it a city break. So essentially you can imagine like a city, normal city like in China can easily go five million, 10 million people. The amount of people and the amount of traffic that go on the road every day, right? So if the city is able to utilize all these video stream of data feedback from different traffic intersections and be able to direct traffic and control the traffic lights dynamically using artificial intelligence, you actually solve a lot of the city's congestion problem. So I think this is where we're seeing a lot of application being explored in China, and using very innovative different ways by Alibaba. Peter, I got to ask you because one of the things we're seeing in theCUBE and Wikibon research is the growth of new kinds of ecosystems. Karen Lu, who runs the general manager of America for Alibaba, said to me that ecosystems are super important for Alibaba as an example, but a new kind of ecosystems developing. Cloud service providers are becoming a new hot growth area because the specialty of building applications in the cloud is not like it was kind of on the old days. You got to have a little bit of a cloud native mindset, but yet domain expertise, whether it's traffic or a certain vertical solution. So it's a little bit of both, horizontally scalable, yet specialism. This is going to create a lot of opportunities for cloud service providers. What's your view on that from Intel's perspective? How are you guys seeing that market? Do you agree? And what are you guys looking at that market? Yeah, so obviously cloud service provider, the likes of Alibaba or the Amazons are one of our fastest scoring customer base over the past five years. And going to the near future, we expect this trend to continue to grow. We definitely see CSPs as a leading edge of driving innovation, because they're not just the leading edge of driving consumer usages, but they also have been like the city brand project. They've been really close on really solving the enterprise problem as well with public cloud. So I think we're very excited to have opportunity to be close partner with CSP like Alibaba to really help them in providing our latest hardware technology to allow them to drive innovation on top with their software and with their programs, with their algorithms. How are they, how are those big cloud service providers or CSPs like Alibaba, they're a big one. They're the fourth cloud in the world enabling their CSPs because I was talking to someone on the floor here, an ISV in the old world who was telling me that he's now a cloud service provider. So you have now this nice balance in the ecosystem developing. You guys see the same thing, how do you guys looking at that? So this is what we call a hybrid situation, right? So while the big CSPs like Alibaba, they have a lot of competency and they have a lot of inter-engineering. It may not make sense for them to create every single application in the world, right? So there may be some legacy enterprise application. For instance, CRM software in China, maybe it's really popular, but then for a collaboration with the leading company Alibaba to translate their on-prem software stack into a cloud solution. So I think we definitely see a lot of that collaboration happening to take the best of the best from the legacy as well as new public cloud environment to really make the better service for the companies and their customers. Great ecosystem opportunity. Okay, so I've got to ask, what is the Intel relationship that you guys are doing on your end with Alibaba cloud? Obviously, they're taking names, they're kicking butt. They're doing well, they're going global. They're not just in China, the first cloud provider here in China to go outside the mainland and they got to see in the US they're in Silicon Valley, our backyard. What's the collaboration, share the relationship? We work very closely with Alibaba, right? Like you said, they are now the leading cloud service provider here in China. They're starting to go abroad. And we as a ingredient technology provider perspective, we have very close collaboration with them, our technologies on hardware roadmap as well as software enabling to make sure they can take full advantage of it. So we're very excited to see the growth of Alibaba over the past few years. And we look forward to seeing them continue to expand their business to get it with us. Yeah, great company. So I got to ask you, one of the collaborations that got my attention was the, I don't want to say hackathon, it was competition, it was the AI competition called TNCHU that you guys were part of with Alibaba. What was Intel's role in that? I saw some of the winners earlier. I didn't get a chance to get the specifics, but taking you through this AI competition that Alibaba did with these entrepreneurs. So I'm actually very excited. I just talked to one of the winning team just now. So what happened is, when we talk about artificial intelligence, today is a lot about image recognition, voice recognition, but that's just pure technology. So what Alibaba decided to do, which Intel is a partner, is we created a medical image contest, right? So we pick a particular subject, for instance, lung cancer. And we invited 16 local hospitals to provide some of the image data of the patients anonymously. And then we have opened it for the software ecosystem, the academia, professors, schools, and say, hey, why don't you come in and try to compete on the image recognition accuracy based on those extra images, use these images. So it takes about six, we have overwhelming turnout. We have about 3,000 teams from 20 different countries applying to join the contest. And then we just selected winner yesterday. So basically, the three winning teams, two of them have found the best universities here in China, one of them is from overseas. And again, Intel's role in this, we provide a lot of the consultation help. First of all, we provide the hardware system based on RZL5 clusters. And on top of that, we provide a lot of software tools, cafe, image recognition libraries, internal libraries to really help the contestant to be able to use them into hardware for the maximum to drive the best performance. And so you guys provided the technology, Ali Babas and Cloud, and let these guys just take, what was the results? And what was the any success? Was there a winner? No, there was a winner. I think a big winner was Beijing University. But I think overall we are not just excited just because of this specific winners, but really the larger intent. If you can imagine in a country like China, there's a lot of people, meaning there's a lot of patients at different part of the country. And not every tier two, tier three city have the same resource or access of the best doctors. If we're able to simplify, the lung cancer image recognition, to be able to provide this as a tool for the tier two, tier three cities of China, imagine how much this will change This is societal impact. Definitely. And you got collective intelligence. It's almost like an open source kind of thing where the more people doing it. It gets better. It gets better. The flywheel. Yeah, and then we have definitely a lot of hospital want to really take advantage of this as well. So we're really glad on the result of this first round. And I think Ali Babas want to do another next round with a different subject as well. And we're looking forward to partnering with them again. That's inspirational. Okay, great to have you on. Thanks for the commentary, exclusive coverage. Final thought, what's your thoughts on the event? Where's AI going? Where do you see this trajectory of Ali Baba and Intel going? Oh, so definitely the event is wonderful and great. This is my third year here. It gets just bigger and bigger every time. So I'm looking forward to come back for the next couple of years again. Our collaboration with Ali Baba has been very close. We work with each other deeply with our engineers collaboration and look forward to coming to bring out more successful projects. And they're really bringing together not just science and developers, but artists. You got a music festival here. It feels like South by Southwest meets a developer conference. Societal impact, traffic solving problems, lung cancer. Big data and data's changing the world. Now, so you need the compute power, you need the analytics. Of course, you need Silicon Angle and the Cuban Wikibon exclusive coverage here in China of the Ali Baba cloud conference. Thanks for watching.