M+E Daily

Adobe and chipmaker Nvidia are collaborating on artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning technologies in a pact they said March 28 was designed to “rapidly enhance” their technologies.

The pact builds on “years of collaboration” between the companies, who “will work to optimize” the Adobe Sensei AI and machine learning (ML) framework for Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs), Adobe and Nvidia said in a news release announcing the expanded collaboration during Adobe Summit 2018 in Las Vegas.

The collaboration will “speed time to market and improve performance of new Sensei-powered services” for Adobe Creative Cloud (CC) and Experience Cloud customers and developers, according to Adobe. The partnership also “advances Adobe’s strategy to extend the availability of Sensei APIs and to broaden the Sensei ecosystem to a new audience of developers, data scientists and partners,” it said.

“Our industry changes so incredibly fast and technology forces are tremendous,” Nvidia CEO and founder Jensen Huang said March 28, during a keynote session at Adobe Summit. For about 25 years, Nvidia was a “tiny company in the presence of giants,” he said. “With technology changing so fast, it’s hard to even stay alive,” so the company had to keep “reinventing” itself, he told attendees, noting that it started making investments in areas outside of traditional graphics chips, in technologies including AI.

“AI is the ultimate assistant – delighting artists with magical capabilities to further their creativity, and helping businesses of every kind to gain insights and efficiencies,” he said in the Adobe-Nvidia news release earlier that day, adding: “Our work with Adobe brings AI within reach for millions of individuals working in the creative and marketing fields, providing them with tools offering performance that was unimaginable just a short time ago.”

“Combining Nvidia’s best-in-class AI capabilities with Adobe’s leading creative and digital experience solutions, all powered by Sensei, will allow us to deliver higher-performing AI services to customers and developers more quickly,” Adobe CEO and president Shantanu Narayen said in the announcement.

Adobe and Nvidia have collaborated for more than a decade to enable GPU acceleration for a broad set of Adobe’s creative and digital experience products, according to the companies. That includes Sensei-powered features, such as auto lip sync in Adobe Character Animator CC and face aware editing in Photoshop CC, as well as cloud-based AI/ML products and features, such as image analysis for Adobe Stock and Lightroom CC and auto-tagging in Adobe Experience Manager.

The companies also plan to work on optimizing Sensei AI services for Nvidia hardware “in the cloud and at the edge, for improved performance and new capabilities,” they said. They also intend to “explore packaging and delivering easy-to-use” Sensei AI services to Nvidia’s ecosystem of developers, they said. That includes services targeted at creative mediums, including mixed reality, the companies said.