One day, there might be an Artificial Intelligence Olympics, where generative AIs compete to create the wildest images, videos, and hallucinatory text responses. In the meantime, we have the real Olympics, starting July 26 in Paris, France. There will be flesh-and-blood athletes on display, but behind the scenes, AI will chat with athletes, share highlight clips, and tell competitors which Olympic sport they’re best equipped to compete in (at least in their fantasies).
“Our biggest focus for these Games, which makes sense given how hot the topic is right now, is on artificial intelligence, which is why we are the official supplier of artificial intelligence platforms to the Olympic Games,” said Sarah Vickers, head of Intel’s Olympic and Paralympic Games office.
I spoke to Vickers as she was about to fly to Paris, where she will spend the next two months overseeing more than 100 Intel employees who will develop and integrate Intel’s AI strategy for the Olympic Games.
Unlike previous years, when Intel invested in drone intelligence to help launch some of the first Olympic drone-synchronized air shows, Intel’s work for the 2024 Paris Olympics remains on the ground and focuses on a handful of key areas.
Medals in chat
Yes, Intel is using its generative AI platform Gaudi 2 to power a chatbot for the Olympics. This chatbot is helping more than 10,000 athletes navigate the sometimes confusing Olympic Village and the Olympic Games.
Vickers told me it’s an LLM for athletes, and explained that it will be integrated into the Athlete 365 application that they already use. It’s supposed to help stressed athletes understand the day-to-day of the Olympics and what’s expected of them. “Just understanding all those things that they have to search for or find in PDFs; putting that into a conversational chatbot for them that’s integrated into an app that they already have that’s also running online.”
It could quickly answer the question of whether taking Tylenol before an event could pose a doping problem, or simply the bus schedules to and from various sporting venues.
With athletes from 200 countries, I was curious to see if the chatbot could speak multiple languages. Vickers wasn’t sure yet if that was possible. There are also no explicit plans to open the chatbot globally, though Vickers believes Intel will be looking for a way to show it to consumers who aren’t attending the games.
As for the safeguards the LLM includes, Intel’s Responsible AI group helped develop the chatbot. “I don’t think you can stop people from asking crazy questions, but I think you can stop what it’s responding to and use that to identify that this is something we don’t have an answer for, and then maybe figure it out,” Vickers told me.
The bronze in the broadcast
On the viewer (and producer) side, Intel AI will comb through event footage to select and serve up highlights. If you think there are enough video highlights online, imagine there are under-viewed events that, while recorded, might not get much love from the broadcaster or production. Good luck finding highlights of an athlete hitting his tenth perfect clay pigeon target or an emotional shot of his parents cheering him on.
“So highlights, traditionally, when Olympics Broadcast Services did them, they were limited by the number of people they had to create highlights. They didn’t have a lot of automation. They did some tagging, but all of that tagging was done manually, and so there was just a limit to what they could put out. Now with AI that we’re doing, auto-tagging, the ability to do real-time highlights, which can be done in just a few minutes and in near real-time.”
This won’t just help obscure sports, but also smaller countries that can’t afford to send full broadcast teams to find and present region-based highlights. This AI tagging could make it as simple as choosing the sport(s) and country, then hitting an export button.
Skills for a gold medal
If you’re lucky enough to attend the Olympics, you’ll see AI at work in the Stade De France, France’s largest sports stadium that will become the Olympic Stadium for the Games. Intel and Samsung have partnered to provide an AI-powered talent identification system on the ground. Using Samsung smartphones and tablets and computer vision to capture participants performing a handful of sports-related exercises, Intel’s cloud-based AI will identify the Olympic sport they’re best suited for.
The two technology companies piloted this program in Senegal, where they used it to identify local youth as potential athletes for the Youth Olympic Games, which will be held in Senegal in 2026.
“We went and had 1,000 kids participate in this activity to see…what is their skill? What can they do? And it could all be done with a mobile phone, (and) very low infrastructure costs on the ground,” Vickers explained.
Silver in navigation
Other AI integrations include a wayfinding system originally designed for people with visual impairments, which now helps everyone find their way through and around the Olympic Village. AI is also used to analyze space usage in the media lounge and the village.
“If you just think about people movement, if you understand occupancy, you understand better how to manage food and beverage. We understand better how to manage the queues for transport. Using that data to make better decisions. That information is also used by the IOC (International Olympic Committee) to help plan for the future.”
Most of Intel’s AI integrations run in the cloud, typically on Intel Xeon processors. The software is typically Intel’s Geti applications, which help with performance and model building. Vickers told me that some AI can run locally (or at the edge) in devices like Samsung tablets and phones, but that’s not how it’s being done for these Olympics.
What Intel isn’t doing is bringing all this AI directly to the opening ceremony. For the pomp and circumstance, it’s just going to be humanity, emotion, and whatever stagecraft the producers can muster—and probably drones, but Intel isn’t providing those.