As the Official Worldwide AI Platform Partner of the Olympic and Paralympic Games Paris 2024, Intel implemented an artificial intelligence (AI) platform technology to improve the experience for fans, organisers, athletes and viewers worldwide.
With 9,5-million tickets sold and 10,500 athletes on-site, Paris 2024 celebrated 32 Olympic sports organised over 750 competition sessions.
With record crowds in Paris, plus billions of television viewers, Intel’s AI platform technology provided first-of-their-kind experiences for fans, athletes and organisers.
Intel’s AI Platform Experience, in collaboration with Samsung, provided an AI-powered fan activation to take attendees on the journey of discovering their ideal Olympic sport.
Trained on Intel Gaudi AI accelerators, running on Intel Xeon processors with built-in AI acceleration and optimized with OpenVINO, the activation used AI and computer vision to analyze athletic drills and match each participant’s profile to an Olympic discipline.
More than 10 500 attendees participated in the activation. Decathlon/heptathlon were the most identified Olympic sport among participating fans, with rowing identified as the most rare. The activation celebrated Olympic sports of all disciplines and demonstrated the power of AI to improve talent detection and athlete training.
Estimates are that more than half of the world’s population engaged via broadcast or digital channels with the Olympic Games Paris 2024. With more than 11 000 hours of content produced by Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), Intel’s processors and AI platform technology streamlined workflows to help bring more engaging content to fans faster than ever.
- 8K OTT Broadcast Workflow Delivery: Paris 2024 was the first Olympic Games to utilize Intel Xeon processors to showcase its end-to-end 8K broadcast, demonstrating the future of low-latency 8K resolution livestreaming over the internet. Broadcast servers powered by the latest Intel Xeon Scalable processors with Intel Deep Learning Boost technology encoded and compressed 391 hours of total streaming and 82 hours of livestreaming at 8K/60FPS/HDR, with all of that distributed by OBS to eight countries worldwide.
- Automatic Highlights Generation: To bring fans customized content, OBS Automatic Highlights Generation, trained on the Intel Geti platform, leveraged AI to package tailored highlights across more than 30 sporting events, helping to level the playing field for broadcast footage of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The result was more than 11 000 hours of content distributed by OBS and more than 100,000 videos produced. Fifteen national broadcasters leveraged automated highlight clips, with the Philippines producing the most. Swimming was the most highlighted sport, followed closely by track and field.
- Immersive Volumetric Video: Powered by Intel Xeon processors and optimized with Intel OpenVINO, two volumetric video studios were set up at the International Broadcast Center and the Olympic Village to help bring fans immersive 3D videos of their favorite athletes. The studios rendered more than 3 000 augmented reality clips for sharing across platforms.
The Olympic Games Paris 2024 welcomed 10,500 athletes on-site with them navigating 39 competition venues. A conversational platform trained on Intel Gaudi 2 AI accelerators, Athlete365, enabled athletes and their teams to access operational information, procedures, policies and other Olympic knowledge.
Leveraging large language models (LLM) performing on Intel Gaudi 2 hardware and utilising retrieval augmented generation (RAG) technology to provide real-time, context-aware interactions, the AI conversational platform delivered 147 queries per hour during the Olympic and Paralympic Games, across six languages, aiding athletes by answering their commonly asked questions quickly so they could focus on training and performance.
The Olympic and Paralympic Games are the ultimate accelerator for the adoption of new technology. Spanning 19 days and multiple venues, the Olympics represent an entire ecosystem of business operations, crowd and event management, hospitality and more.
Supported by Intel’s AI platform technology and processors, Paris 2024 delivered a more engaging and inclusive competition for athletes, fans and viewers, representing substantial innovation in the world of sport.
Featured picture: To bring fans customised content, Intel leveraged AI to package tailored highlights across more than 30 sporting events, helping to level the playing field for broadcast footage of the Olympic and Paralympic Games Paris 2024. (Credit: Intel Corporation)