An Oslo-based team that was developing artificial intelligence networking technologies at British chip startup Graphcore until late last year has been hired by Meta Platforms Inc.
After Reuters discovered 10 persons whose LinkedIn accounts claimed they had worked at Graphcore until December 2022 or January 2023 and then joined Meta in February or March of this year, a Meta spokesman acknowledged the hirings in response to a request for comment.
The decision gives the social media behemoth more clout in its fight to better manage AI work in its data centers as it struggles to keep up with the demand for AI-oriented infrastructure from teams throughout the firm eager to develop new products.
Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, has come to rely more and more on AI technology to target advertising, choose content for its applications’ newsfeed, and remove prohibited information from its platforms.
Additionally, IBM is currently trying to catch up with rivals like Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google in the release of generative AI products capable of producing literature, art, and other content that resembles what a human would produce, which investors regard as the next major growth sector for tech businesses.
According to the employment biographies of the 10 individuals on LinkedIn, the group had worked at Graphcore, which creates computer chips and systems designed for AI work, on networking technologies specifically for AI.
According to a Graphcore spokeswoman, the business closed its headquarters in Oslo as part of a larger restructuring that was announced in October of last year. At the time, Graphcore was struggling to compete with American companies like Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., which control the majority of the AI chip market.
According to two sources who spoke to Reuters, Meta already has an internal unit building several types of chips geared at accelerating and increasing efficiency for its AI work, including a network chip that serves as a sort of server air traffic controller.
Modern AI systems, such as the ones powering the chatbot ChatGPT or the image-generation tool Dall-E, are much too massive to fit on a single processing chip and must instead be distributed over several.
