Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger writes off Nvidia’s dominant AI position as exceptional luck. At Nvidia they point to the lack of vision at Intel.

In an interview at the renowned MIT in the USA, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger attributed Nvidia’s success to luck. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was “extraordinarily lucky,” Gelsinger notes. If Intel hadn’t abandoned its Larrabee project a decade ago, it would have been just as lucky, the CEO believes. Larrabee mentioned Intel’s (first) attempt to break into the GPU market in 2009, but nothing much ever came of it.

In a way, Gelsinger is right: Nvidia was the right company at the right time. Huang and his colleagues were pleased to see that GPUs for graphics applications are also well suited for ML and AI workloads. However, he is very short-sighted. After all, Huang recognized the possibilities of his GPUs long before there was any AI hype. Nvidia then focused heavily on professional (AI) GPUs in addition to its core business at the time: gaming. Powerful accelerators that support deep learning were already rolling off the assembly line years before the hype surrounding generative AI.

Luck or vision?

Huang’s luck is that Nvidia already had plenty of expertise with its GPUs to quickly move to AI. To dismiss the rest as an “extraordinary opportunity” is a bit reductive. Nvidia quickly recognized the opportunities in the market and the CEO had the courage to bet heavily on it. Intel, on the other hand, struggled and struggled during this period, particularly with the transition of its CPUs to 10 nm. It let the AI ​​train pass, just like the mobile train did before.

Bryan Catanzaro, VP of Applied Deep Learning Research at Nvidia, also notes this. According to him, Intel lacked the vision and execution to successfully complete projects like Larrabee.

I worked on Larrabee applications at Intel in 2007. Then I went to NVIDIA in 2008 to work on ML. So I was in both places back then and can say:

NVIDIA’s dominance was no accident. It came from vision and implementation. What Intel was missing. https://t.co/ygUJZIQWLH

— Bryan Catanzaro (@ctnzr) December 20, 2023

You can’t really blame Gelsinger for that. He points out that Larrabee was fired from the CEO position after he left. According to Gelsinger, this was a big mistake. He also admits that Intel hasn’t necessarily made the right decisions since his departure. The CEO notes that Nvidia was initially not interested in adopting AI.

Intel and Gelsinger appear to have begun a vendetta against Nvidia at the end of the year. Gelsinger previously stated that the entire market is aiming for the abolition of CUDA.