There’s a lot of people in the machine learning community who’ll tell you that deep learning (DL) is a dead end. Gadi Singer isn’t one of those people. He believes DL is just getting started, in fact he says we’re about to enter the next phase of AI, and deep learning at the edge is a huge part of that.

He probably knows what he’s talking about. After all most of the world’s AI compute cycles are run on his company’s architecture.

Singer is Intel’s Vice President, Artificial Intelligence Products Group Architecture General Manager. He has the difficult task of figuring out what to do next with the company’s AI vision. Unlike Ray Kurzweil, Google’s AI futurologist, Singer is more grounded in the nuts and bolts of his company’s AI plans. So his predictions aren’t for a faraway future: they’re for 2019 and 2020.

According to him, Intel’s AI strategy is a three-pronged approach that embraces all of machine learning. He says DL is just starting to mature beyond its infancy, so his company needs to be prepared to provide solutions for its practical use at the edge.

When asked what that means for the field of AI, as a whole, he says “It is a next phase, it’s the next phase.”