Intel Capital has invested over $1bn in AI companies, says CEO Brian Krzanich

Intel’s investment arm, Intel Venture Capital, has announced that it has invested over $1bn in start-ups that are focused on developments in artificial intelligence.

Writing in an op-ed, CEO Brian Krzanich said Intel has an "optimistic and pragmatic" view of AI’s potential impact on society, jobs and daily life.

"AI will mimic other profound transformations, creating significant new opportunities to transform business and have an immensely positive impact on society," wrote Krzanich.

Krzanich placed heavy emphasis on Intel’s role in the future of artificial intelligence, stating: "Intel will be the AI platform of choice, offering unmatched reliability, performance, security and integration.

"We are 100 percent committed to creating the roadmap of optimized products to support emerging mainstream AI workloads."

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"AI solutions require a wide range of power and performance to meet application needs, and Intel has the largest selection of options for our customers to choose from."

"Businesses will need unmatched flexibility and infrastructure optimization so that both highly specialized and general-purpose AI functions can run alongside other critical business workloads, and we feel the Intel Nervana AI portfolio will deliver this."

The Artificial Intelligence Products Group has already been set up by Intel and is led by Naveen Rao, who was previously CEO and co-founder of AI software firm Nervana.

Rao has previously reinforced the importance of AI to Intel in an op-ed in March, stating that the company will "push the forefront of computing" with their research lab.

"Data inference, or finding useful structure in data, may indeed be the largest computational problem of our time. That is why AI is so important to Intel," Rao wrote.