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OctoAI, a Seattle AI startup that allowed customers to run quite a lot of basis fashions whereas shielding them from the complexity of the underlying infrastructure, has been acquired by GPU large Nvidia.
Rumors have swirled a couple of doable acquisition since mid-September, when The Info broke the story that the 2 firms have been in “superior talks” relating to an acquisition by Nvidia. Final week, OctoAI Founder and CEO Luis Ceze confirmed the deal in a LinkedIn submit.
“I’m very excited to share that I’m becoming a member of NVIDIA,” Ceze wrote. “Constructing OctoAI (now NVIDIA) has been a implausible journey going from pioneering analysis on ML compilers on the College of Washington, to driving Apache TVM adoption to constructing merchandise valued by clients in a fast-paced business.”
There are many unanswered questions relating to this acquisition, together with what function Ceze can have at Nvidia. Ceze, who shared the title of VP AI programs software program at Nvidia, says in his LinkedIn submit that he’s “excited to hitch NVIDIA and contribute to increasing efforts in ML compilers and cloud infrastructure for AI.”
It’s additionally unclear how a lot of the OctoAI staff will make the transition over the Nvidia, or what Nvidia will do with the OctoAI software program, if something in any respect. It seems OctoAI clients might want to begin in search of a brand new platform to host their AI workloads, in line with letters OctoAI is writing to clients.
“Now we have made the strategic determination to provoke the wind down of the business availability of our providers,” learn one letter an OctoAI clients posted to LinkedIn. “As such, efficient October 31, 20224, we’re terminating your entry to all OctoAI providers and deactivating your account as permitted below the OctoAI providers Phrases of Use.”
Nvidia has not publicly introduced the deal, which The Info reported is price about $165 million. With debt and different components included, the deal may exceed $250 million, in line with a report by GeekWire.
OctoAI was co-founded in 2019 by Ceze and a number of other people from his analysis group on the College of Washington, together with Jared Roesch, Jason Knight, Thierry Moreau, and Tianqi Chen. The corporate, which initially was named OctoML, was based to commercialize Apache TVM, an open supply software program venture led by Ceze that gives an abstraction layer between machine studying fashions and the {hardware} that it runs on.
OctoAI co-founder and CEO Luis Ceze is now VP of AI programs software program at Nvidia
“Consider it as a center layer between frameworks and {hardware},” Ceze, who was a BigDATAwire Individual to Look ahead to 2024, advised the publication again in 2021. “We provide a clear abstraction throughout all kinds of {hardware}.”
On the software program aspect, Apache TVM supported all the newest frameworks, together with TensorFlow, PyTorch, Keras, MXnet, Core ML, and ONNX. On the {hardware} aspect, Apache TVM supported a variety of processors, together with Intel and AMD CPUs, Nvidia GPUs, ARM CPUs, FPGAs, and even cell chips from Qualcomm. An on-prem model dubbed the Octomizer was additionally out there.
OctoML developed a business model of Apache TVM that allowed clients to convey their ML fashions to quite a lot of {hardware}. Clients may decide and select which processors to run ML coaching and inference workloads on, thereby serving to to maximise efficiency and reduce value.
Because the generative AI craze kicked in, OctoML pivoted its enterprise barely. Whereas it all the time supported laptop imaginative and prescient and pure language processing (NLP) workloads, the corporate sought to emphasise not solely the efficiency and price advantages of its platform, but in addition the flexibleness it brings to clients and the potential to maneuver the place numerous elements of GenAI workloads run to keep away from lock-in.
OctoAI had raised about $132 million over 4 rounds. The most recent was a Collection C spherical led by Tiger World Administration in November 2021 that raised $85 million. The corporate was reportedly valued at about $900 million at the moment.
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