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Intel + Nervana

Today, we’re excited to announce the planned acquisition of Nervana by Intel*. With this acquisition, Intel is formally committing to pushing the forefront of AI technologies. Nervana intends to continue all existing development efforts including the Nervana Neon deep learning framework, Nervana deep learning platform, and the Nervana Engine deep learning hardware. The combination of Nervana’s technology and expertise incorporated into Intel’s portfolio will take deep learning/AI solutions to the next level. We will continue to operate out of our San Diego Headquarters and will retain our talent, brand, and start-up mentality. Nervana started with the idea that we can engineer better solutions for computation by bringing together computer engineering, neuroscience, and machine learning. Amir Khosrowshahi and I brought this idea to Bruno Olshausen (Amir’s PhD advisor) before founding Nervana. Bruno said (and I’m paraphrasing here), “Do it. Do it now! You might already be too late.” This was the catalyst that pushed us over the edge to pursue the idea fully. At this point we invited Arjun Bansal to join the founding team and Nervana was born. Amir then sought advice from his cousin Ali Partovi, co-founder of Code.org and iLike and a well-connected angel investor. Ali became our first investor and trusted advisor to the company. He made introductions to his network and we pulled together a very high-caliber set of seed investors. Soon after, Carey Kloss and Andrew Yang (close friends and ex coworkers of mine) joined Nervana to lead the hardware development efforts. We’re proud to say that in just 2.5 years, we pushed the performance envelope in deep learning and will soon have a revolutionary new architecture to push it even further.”

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