Meta Expands AI Team in with Experienced Engineers Formerly from IPU Chip Company Graphcore

Printed: 5 Might 2023, 2:00 pm Up to date: 05 Might 2023, 2:00 pm

Meta has employed an skilled group of Oslo-based engineers who have been engaged on constructing AI networking expertise at British chip firm Graphcore, per a Reuters report.

Reuters discovered 10 folks on LinkedIn who had left Graphcore in December 2022 or January 2023 and joined Meta in February or March. In line with Reuters, their LinkedIn job descriptions stated that that they had been engaged on AI networking expertise at Graphcore.

Jon Carvill, a Meta spokesperson, confirmed the brand new hires to Reuters, saying that the corporate just lately “welcomed quite a few highly-specialized engineers in Oslo” to its infrastructure group. With their deep experience within the design and improvement of supercomputing programs, the newly employed engineers will help Meta’s AI and machine studying efforts within the firm’s knowledge facilities.

The brand new hires joined Meta after Graphcore closed its Oslo workplace in an organization restructuring introduced final October as the corporate struggled to compete with Nvidia Corp and Superior Micro Units Inc. 

Graphcore reached unicorn standing in 2018 with a valuation of $1.7 billion following a $200 million Collection D funding spherical, with participation from BMW and Microsoft. In 2020, the corporate raised one other $222 million at a valuation of $2.77 billion however confronted a setback when Microsoft opted for Nvidia’s GPUs over Graphcore’s chip to construct Azure’s cloud computing infrastructure.

Meta is now specializing in and investing closely in AI to catch as much as different tech giants of their developments within the discipline. Internally, Meta is seeing demand for AI infrastructure from groups throughout the corporate. The social media big has additionally been counting on AI expertise for focused promoting and to take away banned content material from its platforms.

Whereas Carvill didn’t disclose what the engineers are engaged on, two sources advised Reuters that Meta has an in-house unit designing varied chips that optimize effectivity for AI work, together with a community chip. Community chips transmit and obtain knowledge over a community and are produced by Nvidia, AMD, and Intel. 

On high of that, Meta is making a computing chip that may prepare AI fashions in addition to make judgments and generate responses, though it received’t be prepared till 2025.

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