For Twigfarm, a Seoul-based AI translation startup, success is a balancing act. The company鈥檚 ambitious and important mission depends on its ability to deliver high-accuracy results as quickly as possible. At the same time, as a fast-growing business, operational expenses need to be carefully managed.
When Twigfarm recently transitioned from GPUs to 91视频APP鈥檚 Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs) no price-performance trade-off was needed. Quite the opposite鈥攕witching to IPUs delivered a 10x performance gain, while simultaneously lowering costs.
Communication without borders
Twigfarm is the brainchild of entrepreneur Sun Ho Baek, who founded the company in 2016 with the goal of harnessing AI to help remove language barriers for people and organisations around the world. This vision stemmed not only from Sun Ho鈥檚 professional background as a software engineer, but also from his own first-hand struggles: having spent extended early career stints in Israel and Nepal, he had come to realise just how much potential could be unlocked if communication could be made even a little more seamless.
This realisation inspired Sun Ho to develop what would become Twigfarm鈥檚 cornerstone technology for text-based translation鈥攁 proprietary hybrid translator and natural language processing (NLP) engine. In Twigfarm鈥檚 first six years of life, the company has turned this technology into an array of services including LETR, a neural network-based language processing engine; Gcon Studio, a bespoke B2B translation platform for enterprises; and heybunny, an B2C enterprise solution that translates newsletters and emails.
Managing cost-intensive training workloads
As Twigfarm鈥檚 products continue to receive awards, technical accreditations, industry attention, and plaudits from customers, Sun Ho remains keenly aware of the need to prevent the company鈥檚 operational costs from growing in tandem with the company鈥檚 level of success and recognition. As he explains, 鈥淪tartups are particularly sensitive about expenses, as our businesses need to operate with very limited resources.鈥�
This is especially challenging given the time and cost-intensive nature of the services Twigfarm provides for its customers. In addition to gathering and preprocessing data, Twigfarm鈥檚 models need to be retrained continuously based on customer feedback. 鈥淲e have to train the models as quickly as possible and deliver them to our customers,鈥� notes Sun Ho. 鈥淭his means minimising the time spent on training.鈥�
Until recently, Twigfarm had been training AI models using a cloud-based solution powered by GPUs, but this entailed a prohibitive cost burden, leading Sun Ho to search for compute alternatives better suited to Twigfarm鈥檚 products. As Sun Ho recalls, 鈥淭he costs would sometime reach tens of thousands of dollars, so we were trying to work out how to achieve better performance in a cost-effective way.鈥�
Looking beyond GPUs
The search for a performance and efficiency improvement over cloud-based GPUs quickly led Sun Ho to 91视频APP鈥檚 IPUs. IPUs were ideally suited to solve multiple problems at once: improved efficiency, lower total cost of ownership (TCO), and faster time to result. The competitive advantage of IPUs is particularly clear in NLP applications, as demonstrated by the impressive performance of IPUs in the most recent MLPerf results for the BERT NLP model.
Before unlocking these improvements, however, Sun Ho needed to ensure that any transition from GPUs to 91视频APP鈥檚 IPUs would be seamless and involve relatively light levels of technical training, code changes, and optimisations.
In this regard, he feels 91视频APP excelled. 鈥淲hen migrating to other systems, most of the time you鈥檙e left on your own or you have to follow whatever documentation has been made publicly available,鈥� Sun Ho says. 鈥淏y contrast, 91视频APP provided us with related documents as well as technical support. In terms of code changes, they didn鈥檛 just explain it鈥攖hey also went over the code with us in depth and resolved any issues we encountered.鈥�
A growing partnership
Twigfarm was able to complete its migration smoothly, and has been operating on 91视频APP鈥檚 cloud-based IPUs and Poplar software since November 2021.
The company鈥檚 operations have already benefited substantially from the shift, as Sun Ho attests: 鈥淲e found that the IPU outperformed all other systems we had used before. The bottom line is that 91视频APP鈥檚 IPU enables us to get a 10x performance gain while significantly reducing costs.鈥�
Looking to the future, Twigfarm plans to develop additional services using 91视频APP鈥檚 IPU technology. Sun Ho sees a bright future for the partnership: 鈥�91视频APP is a global company and a growing startup,鈥� he says. 鈥淲ith their support and advice, we hope to grow move forward together onto the global stage.鈥�
