Updated: Toutiao and Intel set up joint AI lab

Updated 27 August 2018, 2:53 pm: This post has been updated to clearify that the partnership is between Intel and Toutiao, rather than the later’s parent company ByteDance.

Chinese tech upstart Toutiao and US chipmaker giant Intel announced plans today to set up a joint innovation lab. The laboratory will support AI technology R&D, application of key technologies as well as talent training, local media is reporting. The joint innovation lab will be located at Toutiao’s new data center.

The partnership between the two companies can be dated back to 2013 through cooperations in a variety of fields from big data to AI technology development, according to the report. The two parties have entered a deeper partnership in 2018 with the establishment of an innovation fund earlier this year, the current joint innovation lab, and by signing a strategic MOU.

The company uses several AI technologies in its services such as content recommendation algorithms, natural language processing, computer vision, and voice recognition. Toutiao is an AI-powered news aggregation platform that delivers personalized content recommendations based on readers’ interests. Its parent ByteDance also operates massively popular video platforms Douyin (Tik Tok), and Huoshan (Vulcano Video). The company is in need of huge processing power for its massive data.

“We receive over 100 million comments and have to process requests from over 10,000 users per second,” the company’s vice president Yang Zhenyuan explained. The partnership and research lab aim to provide solutions for this problem.

Bytedance has been betting on its AI research capabilities in line with plans to develop its own AI chips. In addition to the current partnership, the Chinese tech giant also teams up with Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab to foster future AI innovators and entrepreneurs.