Meta Platforms Inc has hired an Oslo-based team that was building artificial intelligence networking technology at British chip unicorn Graphcore until late last year.
After Reuters identified 10 people who said on their LinkedIn profiles that they worked at Graphcore until December 2022 or January 2023 and then joined Meta in February or March of this year, a Meta spokesperson said: Hiring confirmed at request for comment.
“We recently welcomed a number of highly specialized engineers from Oslo to Meta’s infrastructure team. brings deep expertise to the design and development of ,” said Jon Carvill. Meta spokesperson.
The move is racing to meet the demand for AI-oriented infrastructure from teams across the company looking to build new capabilities, so social media critics say it will improve how data centers handle the work of AI. brings even more power to the giant’s bid.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, increasingly relies on AI technology to target ads, select posts to app feeds, and remove banned content from its platforms.
In addition, it joins competitors such as Microsoft Corp and Alphabet Inc’s Google in rushing to release generative AI products that can create human-like writing, art, and other content. Investors see it as the next big growth area for technology companies.
Ten employee job descriptions posted on LinkedIn showed the team worked on AI-specific network technologies at Graphcore, which develops computer chips and systems optimized for AI work.
Carvill declined to disclose what he is working on with Meta.
Graphcore closed its Oslo office as part of a broader restructuring announced last October, a spokesperson for the startup said. This is because he has struggled to compete with US-based companies such as Nvidia Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc, which dominate the market for AI chips. .
Meta already has an in-house unit that designs several types of chips aimed at speeding up AI work and maximizing efficiency, including a network chip that performs a sort of air traffic control function for servers. It does, two sources told Reuters.
Efficient networking is especially useful for modern AI systems behind the chatbot ChatGPT and the image generation tool Dall-E. These are too big for him to fit on one computing chip, instead he must stitch together many chips and divide them.
A new category of network chips has emerged to keep data moving smoothly within these computing clusters. Nvidia, AMD, and Intel Corp all make such network chips.
In addition to network chips, Meta also designed complex computing chips to perform both AI model training and inference (the process by which trained models make decisions and generate responses to prompts). I’m here. Around 2025.
Graphcore, one of the UK’s most valuable tech start-ups, has been seen by investors including Microsoft and venture capital firm Sequoia as a promising potential challenger to Nvidia’s overwhelming lead in the AI chip systems market. was done.
But when Microsoft scrapped an early deal to buy Graphcore’s chips for its Azure cloud computing platform in 2020, the company faced a setback, according to a report in British newspaper The Times. Microsoft instead used his Nvidia GPUs to build the massive infrastructure that powers ChatGPT developer OpenAI, which Microsoft also backs.
Sequoia has since cut its investment in Graphcore to zero, but remains on the company’s board, according to sources familiar with the relationship. The write-down was first reported by Insider in October.
A Graphcore spokesperson confirmed the setback, but said the company is “perfectly positioned” to capitalize on the accelerating commercial adoption of AI.
Graphcore was last valued at $2.8 billion after raising $222 million in its latest investment round in 2020.
