NTT Group's company-wide AI initiative backed by NVIDIA Tesla V100

NTT Group is adopting NVIDIA’s Tesla V100 artificial intelligence (AI) platform, based on Tensor Core GPUs, as the common platform for its company-wide corevo AI initiative.

NTT Group has more than 5,000 researchers and has assigned 400 AI specialists to support the corevo, which extends to a broad range of commercial products and services built on real-time processing. These include projects in areas focused on natural language processing in call centres, network maintenance, human assistance and healthcare.

The Tesla V100 brings speed and scalability for AI inferencing and training, as well as for accelerating high performance computing and graphics workloads. Built on Volta, NVIDIA’s seventh-generation GPU architecture, Tesla V100 GPUs include 21 billion transistors and deliver the performance of up to 100 CPUs in a single GPU.

“With growing demand for AI across multiple industries, NVIDIA and NTT are making advances in deep learning to tackle some of the greatest challenges of our time,” said Ian Buck, VP and GM, Accelerated Business at NVIDIA. “Through NTT’s cloud-based resource centre, NTT researchers can accelerate their AI development to deliver powerful new AI products and services to customers.”

Masahisa Kawashima, VP, NTT Software Innovation Center, said: “Creating a common development platform for the NTT Group will enable us to utilise the results of NTT Group’s AI research and development (R&D) effectively and accelerate the creation of new value. I am convinced that adopting the NVIDIA AI platform will prove vital in expanding corevo services and products.”

NTT conceived of corevo two years ago to address a wide range of issues confronting Japanese society, particularly related to its rapidly ageing population which is leading to a diminishing active workforce and geriatric-related challenges.

Corevo is focused on four broad AI capabilities, including Agent AI focused on natural language processing and chat for call centre and geriatric monitoring; Ambient AI focused on big data analytics for traffic analysis and control; Heart-Touching AI focused on body and emotional analytics for healthcare, sports and entertainment; and Network AI for anonymous detection, failure prediction and network monitoring.