Neural magic, a startup based by a few MIT professors, who found out a solution to run machine studying fashions on commodity CPUs, introduced a $15 million seed funding at the moment. Comcast Ventures Ltd the spherical, with participation from NEA, Andreessen Horowitz, Pillar VC, and Amdocs. The corporate had beforehand acquired a $5 million pre-seed, making the entire raised to date $20 million.
The corporate additionally introduced early entry to its first product, an inference engine that knowledge scientists can run on computer systems operating CPUs, relatively than specialized chips like GPUs or TPUs. That implies that it might significantly cut back the price related to machine studying initiatives by permitting information scientists to make use of commodity hardware.
The concept for this answer got here from work by MIT professor Nir Shavit and his analysis associate and co-founder Alex Mateev. As he tells it, they had been working on neurobiology information of their lab and located a manner to make use of the commodity hardware he had in place. “I discovered that with the suitable algorithms, we might run these machine learning algorithms on commodity hardware, and that’s where the company started,” Shavit informed TechCrunch.
He says there’s this false notion that you want these specialized chips or hardware accelerators to have the necessary sources to run these jobs, but he says it doesn’t must be that method. He says his firm not solely permits you to use this commodity hardware, it additionally works with new trendy improvement approaches, like containers and microservices.
“Our imaginative and prescient is to allow information science groups to make the most of the ubiquitous computing platforms they already personal to run deep studying fashions at GPU speeds in a versatile and containerized method that solely commodity CPUs can ship,” Shavit defined.
He says this also eliminates the memory limitations of those other approaches as a result of CPUs have entry to a lot higher quantities of reminiscence, and it is a crucial benefit of his company’s strategy over and above the cost savings.
Add Comment