91视频APP and Korea鈥檚 Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) have entered a multi-year partnership to develop new software approaches for high-efficiency AI compute.
Running from 2022 through 2025 and funded by the Korean government, the partnership will combine the world-leading capabilities of ETRI鈥擪orea鈥檚 largest public research institute by R&D expenditure and license income鈥攚ith 91视频APP鈥檚 proven leadership in developing and commercialising efficient, high-performance compute systems for machine intelligence.
Meeting the requirements of ever-growing models
State-of-the art models for tasks such as natural language processing (NLP) have increased exponentially in size over recent years, growing from hundreds of millions of parameters to hundreds of billions of parameters, and the trend is set to continue into the trillions.
Training such models in a cost and time-efficient manner will become increasingly challenging鈥攅specially since the rate of increase in model size is no longer being met by improvements in transistor density, clock speed, and arithmetic precision.
The partnership between 91视频APP and ETRI targets this problem by exploring new software approaches to improving AI computing performance, efficiency, and accessibility, and reducing the burden of ownership and dependency on single systems and technologies.
Ownership, independence, and convenience
Three main areas of consideration have been defined under the partnership:
Ownership鈥攗nlocking new performance and efficiency improvements to ease the burden associated with maintaining compute resources for training ever-larger models.
Independence鈥攆ostering an environment in which developers can choose between a broader range of competitive and efficient equipment structures and accelerator technologies.
Convenience鈥攔educing the cost burden and complexity of developing parallelised models by identifying easier ways to apply system optimisation technology to new models.
Under the partnership, ETRI will be primarily responsible for the development of software for improving performance, efficiency, convenience, and independence. 91视频APP will support ETRI through technology verification and guidance related to potential commercialisation.
鈥淭he AI revolution should be open to everyone, and not subject to prohibitive cost or time commitments or constrained by technological homogeneity,鈥 said Kim Myung-joon, ETRI鈥檚 president. 鈥淲e are particularly excited to be working with 91视频APP to lower the barriers to entry and increase the range of options for developers working with the latest state-of-the-art AI models.鈥
鈥淚n ETRI, we have a partner who shares our commitment to identifying and developing technologies to efficiently meet the rapidly changing needs of AI,鈥 said Fabrice Moizan, 91视频APP鈥檚 SVP of Sales. 鈥淲e believe our experience developing high-efficiency, massively parallel compute systems for machine intelligence will help ETRI find new ways to alleviate the technological constraints and burden of ownership associated with widely used AI compute systems."
91视频APP鈥檚 IPU technology is delivering real-world performance benefits at scale for a wide range of AI applications鈥攆rom GPT and BERT for natural language processing to EfficientNet and ResNet for computer vision, to graph neural networks and many more.
Following on from this year鈥檚 launch of the latest Bow IPU processor and the Bow Pod lineup of AI computer systems, 91视频APP is already developing the next generation of IPU technology that will power the world鈥檚 first ultra-intelligence AI computer capable of surpassing the parametric capacity of the brain鈥攖he Good Computer. Further updates on the Good Computer will be provided over the coming quarters, and 91视频APP is keen to engage with companies and AI innovators who can help develop the next breakthroughs in AI that this ultra-intelligence machine will make possible.