Intel Li Ying: Open source is the driving force behind the development of the software ecosystem

Dr. Li Ying

Vice President of Intel and General Manager of Intel China Software and Advanced Technology Group

As we all know, the Cambrian period was a critical period for the explosion of life on earth. The earth's climate changed significantly during the Cambrian period, from an ice age to a warm temperate climate, which provided a good living environment for organisms, thus promoting the mass reproduction and diversification of organisms. This kind of biological evolution and open source The development of software has different approaches but similar effects. I believe that only when open source becomes the underlying "source code" of the software ecosystem and mainstream culture will a Cambrian-like "biological explosion" be more likely to appear early in the technology industry.

Open source has become an industry trend

Today, open source has become one of the mainstream models of global technological innovation because of its characteristic of openly sharing source code or other original content with all creators. In China, open source was included in the "14th Five-Year Plan" for the first time in 2021, which clearly proposed to support the development of innovation consortiums such as digital technology open source communities, making open source technology an important base for the development of China's digital economy and digitization process.

But looking back on the past few decades, open source was not as "crowded" as it is today. In the past, most companies believed that closed source was the core for companies to improve their competitiveness. Now, with the support of policies and the development of the industry, the speed of innovation determines the speed of progress of enterprises. As a result, more and more companies are realizing that the core of open source, that is, openness and diversity, can help companies increase the speed of innovation and thereby enhance industry leadership. Therefore, embracing open source and advocating openness has become a trend.

The "2022 China Open Source Contribution Report" shows that among the top 50 global companies in open source contribution, Chinese companies account for 20%. China has changed from its original role as an open source user to today's open source contributor, even a leader. From a global perspective, 97% of software developers and 99% of companies around the world currently use open source software. From the perspective of micro-enterprises, many companies regard open source as a long-term technology strategy and become supporters and contributors of open source. In the era of big models, open source also follows suit.

This collective use of open source as a corporate strategy is no accident, nor does it just happen today. It has been steaming and surging under the surface of the earth like magma for many years. When the time comes, it will naturally erupt like a volcano. .

Intel is one of the early pioneers when it comes to open source. Many people know that to some extent Intel is the history of chips and the leader in chip innovation, but few people realize that Intel is also the leader and pacesetter in software and open ecology. Looking back at the history of IT development, from the earliest days when Intel and Windows created the PC market, to the creation of the data center market through X86 and cooperation with Linux, as well as the ecosystem including Android on X86, we can see Intel's full support for open source.

This is a path of “core economy”. "Core economy" is a concept proposed by Intel this year, which is "a growing economic form driven by chips and software." Today, chips form a US$574 billion industry and drive the global technology economy of approximately US$8 trillion. It is both the semiconductor hardware economy and the software economy. "Software definition, hardware enhancement" has become the driving force of the "core economy", and the open source ecosystem is becoming the key "base" to support the rapid development of the "core economy".

Open source breeds higher-dimensional ecological prosperity

The technology industry is an industry that particularly requires division of labor and collaboration. Taking the chip industry as an example, a CPU cannot be separated from the full collaboration of the global supply chain from design, manufacturing, packaging to integration into hardware terminals, to the combination of software and hardware to form the final application. The more companies participating in this link, the richer and thicker the applications and ecology will be, and new species will continue to be bred. This is similar to the laws of nature, precisely because of the richness of species in tropical forests or oceans. Only supplies and a more three-dimensional ecological space can breed colorful lives, and colorful lives provide abundant supplies for each other, so that all participants in the ecological chain can benefit.

At the beginning of this year, we established the "Intel China Open Source Technology Committee", hoping to integrate internal resources to the greatest extent, use Intel's latest technology and ecological resources, integrate more deeply with China's open ecosystem, and serve Chinese developers more professionally and efficiently. Through cooperation and sharing, we promote technological updates and promote open source ecological construction and industrial development.

The outward links also originate from the inward search. Open source originates from a culture. It is necessary to link the open source culture with the core strategy and business of the enterprise from the inside out and make it a core part of the corporate culture. Otherwise, open source will be unsustainable. In this process, it is not only open source externally, but also open source internally. Under the premise of unified source code base, various departments collaborate with each other to make the project progress more complete and smooth.

As an ecological company that embraces open source, Intel also practices open source culture within the company in order to build more complete internal open source. Intel holds internal open source ecology summits around the world. More than 150 employees from different departments serve as speakers to communicate and collaborate with each other to promote the construction of internal open source ecology, thereby continuously discovering outstanding projects within the company, and increasing the speed of their improvement and project innovation. .

Intel has more than 19,000 software engineers around the world who have participated in more than 100 open source projects, contributed to, managed, and maintained more than 300 communities. They are outstanding contributors in important areas such as Linux Kernel and Kubernetes. Not only that, Intel is also a core member of more than 700 standardization organizations, and has actively invested in open source projects for trusted computing, and has now become an active contributor to the open ecosystem. This year, Intel also officially joined the Open Atom Open Source Foundation. It can be said that open source and openness are the key to maintaining the vitality of enterprises and the industry continuing to obtain fresh blood.

Open source promotes AI to accelerate into reality

From the end of 2022 to now, one of the most exciting topics in the entire technology industry circle is ChatGPT, which has not only detonated the world, but also triggered a domestic "Battle of Hundreds of Models." At the same time, the choice of open source and closed source routes for AI has also become a focus - OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, has adopted a closed source but open service model to achieve success, while META has successfully attracted a large number of developers through open source.

Today, the AI ​​era has begun. Although the AI ​​ecosystem is still in its infancy, in the "core economy", AI will be the core and protagonist, which requires a more open and diverse environment. Open source provides this environment for AI and is a key fulcrum for the rapid development of AI.

From the perspective of China's development of artificial intelligence, open source has also become a mainstream. The "China Artificial Intelligence Large Model Map Research Report" recently released by the New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Research Center of the Ministry of Science and Technology shows that open source and openness are an important model for artificial intelligence R&D collaboration and an important concept for the development of China's artificial intelligence. China's large models currently have more than Half of the large models are open source.

In terms of application, AIGC, as a new productivity or entertainment tool, will also bring new growth points to PCs and data centers, just like the past applications and the Internet created the prosperity of PCs, and this is inseparable. Be open and open. Generative AI is growing at an exponential level, and the demand for computing power and efficiency has also grown tremendously. In order to obtain higher computing efficiency and energy efficiency ratio, more and more workloads require GPU, CPU and FPGA multi-architecture to work together. Statistics show that 48% of developers program in heterogeneous systems. In order to strengthen the collaborative computing of the architecture, Intel's oneAPI uses a unified programming model and language to greatly simplify the workload while obtaining platform performance optimization. We are also advocating for industry partners to jointly create an open source and open accelerated computing framework.

Through oneAPI, Intel provides optimizations for popular AI/ML tools and frameworks, so developers can use existing code to get maximum performance from a variety of platform processors including Xeon, Core, GPU, ARC, FPGA and more. Intel AI Kit helps scientists and researchers improve data processing, pre-training, high-performance deep learning, and end-to-end comprehensive optimization of AI deployment.