Covering AlibabaCloud'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, and theCUBE, 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, I mean, a huge event here mixing, kind

of a cultural shift, generational shift, young developers.

>> Definitely lots of crowd, you can see people surrounding us, right?

So, artificial intelligence is definitely a hot word here in China for the past 12 months.

Everybody's trying to figure it out, what's going on, how they can 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 obviously, a strategic

partnership with Intel, pretty strategic, and it matters what's inside the Cloud.

But it's not an Intel inside like a PC.

The AI is showing that there's a little bit of Intel on everything, from IoT, industrial

IoT to data center.

It's a range of technology that's powering a new kind of software.

This is where AI is shining.

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 that view?

>> So, essentially today's AI, artificial intelligence, is powered by three factors,

the amount of data, the new algorithms, and lastly the compute power.

And Intel has historically been the leader of create and compute.

So, for the past many years, we 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 in the cloud because we need

the real data to be inputted from a car, for instance, all the cameras, all the sensors.

So, we do definitely see a need of actually faster processors at the edge as well to constantly

bring in the data back into the cloud, so they have an autonomous feedback loop, make

sure there will be right decision making.

>> Yeah, so Cloud drives this, right?

So, it's not just Cloud though, it's software.

There's exponential growth in open source software that's causing a Renaissance in the

developer community.

You're seeing it here in China, a lot of young demographics here.

Software and data's tsunami going on.

You need compute power.

>> Yes, yes.

I think, everybody knows Intel is a hardware company, but we do have a very large effort

on engaging a software ecosystem.

From the old days on engaging Linux, the cloud different software stack, and working with

CSPs like Alibaba in China to really make sure they can create and write the new latest

software AI framework and taking the most advantage of our 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 in China.

Obviously, if you've been here, you know it's kind of congested.

But Alibaba is 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, as you just mentioned.

And Alibaba calls it City Brain.

So, essentially, imagine a normal city like in China, can easily go five million, 10 million

people.

The amount of people and the amount of traffic that goes on the road every day.

So, if the city is able to utilize all these videos' stream of data, feedback from different

traffic intersections, and be able to direct traffics and control the traffic lights dynamically,

using artificial intelligence, you'd actually solve a lot of the city's congestion problem.

So, I think this is where we are seeing a lot of application being explored in China,

they're using very innovative, different ways by Alibaba.

>> Peter, I've 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 Liu, who runs the America's, general manages for America's Alibaba, said to me

that ecosystem is super important for Alibaba as an example.

But a new kind of ecosystem is 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 in 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.

Always often 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, at that market?

>> So, obviously cloud service provider, the likes of Alibaba or Amazon, are one of our

fastest growing customer base over the past five years.

And in the near future, we expect this trend to continue to grow.

We definitely see CSPs as a leading edge of driving innovation because they are not just

the leading edge of driving consumer usages but they also, like the City Brain project,

they've been really close on solving the enterprise problem as well with public cloud.

So, I think we're very excited to have the opportunity to be a close partner with a CSP

like Alibaba to really help them, providing our latest hardware technology to allow them

to drive innovation on top of this offer and with the programs and the 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 just 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.

So, while the big CSPs like Alibaba, they have a lot of competency and they have a lot

of internal engineering, it may not make sense for them to create every single application

in the world.

So, there may be some legacy enterprise application, for instance, a CRM software in China, maybe

it was really popular, for them to forge 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 the new public cloud environment to really make

the better service for the companies and the customers.

>> Create ecosystem opportunity.

Okay, so I 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.

They're the first cloud provider here in China to go outside the mainland.

Obviously, they're in the US, they're in Silicon Valley, our backyard.

What's the collaboration?

Share the relationship.

>> We work very closely with Alibaba.

Like you said, they're now the leading cloud service provider in China.

They're starting going abroad.

And we as an ingredient, knowledge provider perspective, we have a very close collaboration

with them, sharing 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 together 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 hack-a-thon, it was a competition, it was the AI competition called Tianchi that

you guys were a 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 take me through this AI competition that

Alibaba did with these entrepreneurs.

>> So, I'm very, 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 it's a lot about image

recognition, voice recognition but that's just pure technology.

So, what Alibaba decide to do, which in terms of partner, is we created a medical image

contest.

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 opened it up for

the software ecosystem, the academia, professors, the schools, and say, hey, why don't you come

in and try to compete on the image recognition accuracy based on those X-ray images, using

these images?

So, it takes about six, we have overwhelming turnout.

We have about 3,000 teams from 20 different countries applying to join in the contest,

and then we just select the winner yesterday.

So, basically, the three winning teams, two of them are from the best universities here

in China, one of them is from overseas.

And again, Intel's role in this is we provide a lot of consultation help.

First of all, we provide the hardware system based on our Xeon Phi clusters, and on top

of that, we provide a lot of the software tools, Caffe, image recognition libraries,

Intel material libraries to really help the contestant to be able to use the Intel hardware

for the maximum to drive the best performance.

>> And so, you guys provided the technology, Alibaba the Cloud, and let these guys just

take.

What was the results?

Was there any success?

Was there a winner?

>> There was a winner.

I think the 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 all the tier two, tier three cities of China, imagine how much this will

change.

>> It's a societal impact.

>> Definitely.

>> And you've got a 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 fly wheel.

>> And then, we have definitely a lot of hospitals who want to really take advantage of this

as well.

So, we're really glad on the results of this first round, and I think Alibaba will do a

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 Alibaba and Intel going?

>> So, definitely the event's 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 Alibaba has been very close.

We work with each other deeply, with our engineers' collaboration, and I look forward to continuing

to bring out more successful projects.

>> And they're really bringing together, not just science and developers, but artists.

You've got a music festival here, feels like South by Southwest meets a developer conference.

Societal impact, traffic, solving problems, lung cancer, big data, and data is changing

the world.

Now, you need the compute power, you need the analytics.

Of course, you need SiliconANGLE and theCUBE and Wikibon, exclusive coverage here in China

of the Alibaba Cloud Conference.

Thanks for watching.