Real Insights on Artificial Intelligence

– Q –

Hello Dr. Greer, we appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. Let’s get right into it. What benefits does AI hold for business, and society in general?

Dr. Melvin Greer: At Intel, we talk about AI everywhere. A whole set of industries is racing toward AI, and it’s truly improving a lot of people’s lives around the world. Generative AI is the hot topic now, but it’s a sliver of what AI can do and what it will do. We’re at the early stages of realizing AI’s potential. AI everywhere is about making sure that from every device, every individual is in a position to take advantage of AI.

– Q –

Where is AI having the most immediate impacts?

We have specific areas in healthcare where we’re using it for immunotherapy and personalized medicine. For finance, we’re using it for fraud, waste, and abuse and personalized financial capabilities. And environmental protections are high on the adoption list.

– Q –

Can you expand on the benefits AI is bringing to healthcare?

This is the reason why I’m in AI in the first place. My mother died from a terminal illness and she wasn’t able to take advantage of some of the personalized medicines, the advanced prognoses and diagnoses, the ability to look at large data sets to find ways of using drug interdiction and to find ways to drive new therapies that are currently available today as part of AI-enabled healthcare.

We have doctors who can use speech recognition and natural language processing to upload information from the conversations they have with patients directly onto electronic health records so they can spend more time with patients — these are all great things that didn’t exist before. I’m determined to be part of this, not only because of my mom, but across the board.

– Q –

What benefits do you see AI holding for the public sector?

It’s exciting to see the public sector adopting artificial intelligence and transforming a whole series of activities. Some of the primary use cases are public health, predictive analytics, fraud detection and more. I’m also really excited about food safety — my wife is a chef, so food safety is big in my family.

And there’s the consistent delivery of social benefits to citizens in healthcare or other areas where the government provides benefits directly to citizens. AI is transforming all of these in a way that’s making it easier for citizens to access services, for government to aggregate and integrate these services and to do that at a lower cost.

– Q –

The downsides are worth considering. AI can spread disinformation, facilitate cybercrime, and compromise IP rights. How can technology help to manage those risks?

These are legitimate concerns. We need to shape AI for good and elevate awareness of the risks. It’s important for the private and public sectors to work together to shape the future of a more responsible and ethical AI. We must bring visibility, transparency, privacy and trust to the ecosystem.

– Q –

Intel has done a lot of work at the chip level to promote security. Are there solutions for the risks posed by AI that you can build into hardware, or solve through software?

Intel has a keen interest in confidential computing, and our ability to create a trusted environment where Intel and customers, and especially developers, can use AI in a way that’s beneficial. Our ability to create environments that are trusted, that can be used in a way that is consistent with societal expectations around privacy and trust, is part of what we’re doing in both hardware and software. We just rolled out our Trust Authority product to help enable that.

– Q –

So you’re working closely with the AI developer community?

Developers are a primary target. Software defines Intel’s strategy for AI, and energizing the developer community and being able to understand how software plays a role in not only building these solutions and providing trust, but also in being able to manage the convergence of cloud computing, cyber and AI, this is where software plays a very important role.

So we’re spending a significant amount of time supporting developers, ensuring that we provide them with open hardware and open-source software capabilities. We’re very focused on making sure our software is available in open-source environments like GitHub. We provide software for developers in a way that is easy for them to consume for the applications and functions that they’re writing. One of the most important things that we do with developers is we show them how to optimize their software across the family of hardware capabilities that we offer. What’s really interesting about that is we’re seeing that developers are getting a four to 10-times improvement in performance just by using Intel deep learning accelerators and optimizing software approaches.

– Q –

Is it tough to find people with skills in AI?

Every industry is looking to leverage AI. So we absolutely need more talent and a more diverse set of talent focused on AI solutions. This means spending a significant amount of time providing educational resources. One example of that is the work we’re doing with community colleges.

57 percent of community college students are in underserved communities, and they represent a significant area that we want to help develop. We’ve created a curriculum where we’ve partnered with 18 community colleges to develop AI skills. Everyone knows Intel partners with very large research institutions, but our work in community colleges is unique.

It’s very important because it ignites the workforce across industries and helps people who are maybe first-time college students in their family.

– Q –

As a scientist of color, do you see yourself as a role model or mentor for kids from underrepresented communities?

I absolutely do, and I take that responsibility extremely seriously. One of the things I appreciate about being at Intel, as a fellow, the highest level of technical job that you can acquire here, and being a person of color representing this AI and data science community is really, really important. I spend a lot of time mentoring and coaching kids in data science, robotics and leadership skills because we need a more diverse set of communities in the development of these AI solutions.

We need the technical talent, the creativity, the innovation that our minority communities provide. Our ability to have a diverse workforce only makes the solutions that we create better. When we talk about AI everywhere, we don’t mean just in majority communities, we mean everywhere.

– Q –

Having a diverse workforce internally, I would imagine is what allows you to create solutions that meet the reality on the ground for all the communities that that you’re aiming to serve?

That’s right. And that’s the reason why, again, representation in the development of these technologies is so important. And I don’t mean diversity just in terms of race, right? We’re talking about people who are neurodivergent, and we have a whole program focused on ensuring women participate in the development of AI solutions. We want people who have different kinds of thinking. And so various areas of diversity are pouring into this contribution to AI solutions.

– Q –

It takes a tremendous amount of processing power to train generative AI models. Is Intel working on anything to help make that process more efficient?

It’s a legitimate concern. I think people recognize that the use of these new technologies impacts the environment. If you take a look at our work on neuromorphic computing in our next-gen Intel Labs, you’ll see there’s a focus on having extremely fast compute capabilities, but also on high efficiency on the energy side. We’re talking about very, very low power consumption. This, along with being able to do analytics on very small data sets that are more context aware, have the potential for addressing some of these concerns around the environmental impact of AI.

– Q –

We’re just in the beginning of the AI wave. What excites you, as you look to the future?

Everything is exciting. I am a data scientist, but I’m not really good at predicting the future. But I will tell you that I’m expecting that artificial intelligence is going to have a tremendous influence as we move from Web2 to Web3, and build on top of that persistent digital application environments.

– Q –

Thank you for your insights, Dr. Greer. Before we let you go, any other thoughts on the topic you think our readers should know?

One of the things I want your readers to do around AI is to continue to become more educated and participate in the conversations around how AI is being developed, and how they want to see it supporting the capabilities that they need in their everyday lives. I think the only way we can really continue the accelerated adoption curve is by ensuring that more people participate in this AI everywhere conversation.  Ultimately, AI is about improving lives. Working at Intel, I can tell you that is a key focus of our AI capability and vision. I’m excited about the future.

Used responsibly, AI can improve our world.