The Six Five team discusses Intel and DigitalBridge.
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: Intel and DigitalBridge announced the formation of an AI company called, Articul8. Dan, what is this? I didn’t get briefed on this. I did see the press release across, but can you parse through here?
Daniel Newman: It seems like a bit of an accelerator, Pat. I didn’t get it either. Our team wrote a research note. We’ll put it in the link. It basically was created with the IP that was developed at Intel and the companies are going to be working together to… Actually, it’s kind of scaled demand for enterprise workloads. And by the way, this isn’t technology-agnostic, meaning hardware-agnostic tie up. Meaning, these things aren’t being tried and tested on Intel Silicon, but it’s not only for Intel Silicon. And so there’s an investment arm in this. So Digital Ventures, that’s the venture initiative of DigitalBridge, was the lead investor, but there was a bunch of other investors that came into this, Fin Capital, Mindset, Communitas. So just so you know, this is a bigger group and it’s all about GenAI. It’s all about the fact that the expectation is that GenAI is going to scale substantially in how it’s going to be incorporated into workflows. And that basically building turnkey GenAI software platforms, speed, security, efficiency, and coming together and doing so. And optimizing it on Intel to test and show that it can be done.
Now, there was some early testing of the software that was done with BCG, another kind of well-known consulting organization. They’ve worked together to scale the platform. They’ve worked with enterprise customers, they focused on the big industries. So fin service, telecommunication, I believe they also work even in the semiconductor industry. And so effectively, this independent company, which is kind of interesting, I don’t know if this is a Gelsinger thing, but he does like to kind of create these subsidiaries and partnerships he’s done it with… He did it with the Mobilize spinoff. He’s doing it now with the FPGA spinoff. This is another sort of co-invested partner strategy. But I think what it is it’s like a proof of concept environment for Intel’s hardware. It’s the company’s ability to bring an ecosystem together to build software, which is a big proof point for the company, to scale the adoption of generative AI, and to do so kind of outside of the walls of the Intel org, but to do so with Intel still being front and center.
And so effectively, it’s an AI platform, customer data training, inference, security, and gives the customer the ability to deploy these GenAI workloads and cloud, on-prem in a hybrid environment and to do so in an open ecosystem. So Pat, I don’t know if we didn’t get briefed because it’s kind of a footnote type of announcement, but it seems pretty big to me and it seems like an important proof point as Intel is really trying to make sure it inserts itself in a meaningful way, into this GenAI conversation.
Patrick Moorhead: Listen, I probably got invited, but I was skiing in Aspen on January 3rd.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, yeah. It’d be fair that we say that. We might’ve both been in transit when this was going on.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. So there’s a lot of ways that Intel could have taken this. Right? One thing says, “Oh hey, there’s no value. Let’s shut this down.” The second way is to open source it, offer it to everybody and maybe put it into Linux Foundation or something like that. And the third way is to do what they did, which is to spin it off as its own company. So obviously, the company thinks the mission and what the company does absolutely has value and described as a full stack, vertically optimized generative AI platform that goes across cloud, on-prem or hybrid. Right? That’s almost too good to be true. Almost nobody has figured that out yet. So it seems like there’s value. And I had a quote from CEO, Pat Gelsinger, which means that this is pretty important here. But Pat obviously, sees this better on its own than sitting inside of Intel.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, he makes a lot of wise calls. I’m kind of watching and learning what’s going to happen here. Want a little more detail, maybe a little more specificity on kind of what these partnerships entail, what they’re going to build, what they’re going to deliver. But it sounds to me like this is about pairing up the complexities of hardware, software, service relationships, and delivering GenAI at scale. And it’s something that I know it’s very top of mind to Pat and to Intel. So good stuff, Pat.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. My final commentary is, I think I remember now a conversation about Intel getting into this business themself, which it appears that they’re not going to do that and what comes out of the backend is Articul8. So it’s going to be an interesting thing to watch. And the companies I would expect to get on this would be some of the largest companies out there. Interestingly enough, Articul8 does have some customers listed on their website. One of them is obviously, BCG like you said, but also a company called Uptick, and the other one, which is Scripps, which interesting.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
