Sonoma Creek to target non-AI experts, according to docs seen by El Reg
Exclusive Intel plans to start selling a software platform that promises to simplify and speed up the training of AI models for computer vision, according to internal company documents seen by The Register. The software, code-named Sonoma Creek, is set to launch this fall, and the semiconductor giant plans to sell it as a subscription or license, which is part of a fresh push by the x86 giant to buoy chip sales with a growing stable of commercial software products. Intel also sees Sonoma Creek as a way to boost adoption of its free OpenVINO software toolkit for AI inference work. Intel is pitching Sonoma Creek as an «end-to-end AI development platform» that simplifies computer-vision model training for subject matter experts who don’t have data science experience. The chipmaker thinks Sonoma Creek will benefit multiple industries. This includes manufacturing, where computers can monitor assembly lines and look for defects, and healthcare, where computers can detect anomalies in medical imaging. Other industries cited include smart agriculture, smart cities, retail, and video safety. Development of Sonoma Creek has been under wraps for some time. However, there have been some public references to the software. This includes a publicly accessible online workshop Intel held for users in South Korea last year that featured a company representative discussing the software. The CEO of Intel’s Korea business also mentioned Sonoma Creek in a Korean news article in December. In one presentation, Intel says Sonoma Creek brings together five important steps of AI model training said to be fragmented across multiple services in a «single workflow.» These five steps are data collection, data labeling, model selection and training, model optimization, and deployment. The software works like this, according to multiple documents: Sonoma Creek starts training computer-vision models using the PyTorch and TensorFlow frameworks with as few as 10 to 20 images, or a video. Users then annotate the data using what Intel calls «smart assistants,» which helps Sonoma Creek learn and improve the model’s accuracy.
