OAKLAND, California Reuters- Groq, a Silicon Valley chip startup founded by a former Alphabet Inc engineer, said on Thursday it has adapted technology similar to the underpinnings of the popular ChatGPT to run on its chips.
Groq modified LLaMA, a large language model released last month by Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc., that can be used to generate human-like text.
According to some estimates, Meta's researchers developed LLaMA using chips from Nvidia Corp, which has a market share of nearly 90% for AI computing. Showing that a cutting-edge model can be moved easily to Groq's chips could help the startup prove that its products are a viable alternative to Nvidia.
With startups like SambaNova and Cerebras and big companies like Advanced Micro Devices Inc and Intel Corp, Groq is trying to chip away at Nvidia's market share.
Efforts to find alternative chips to Nvidia's have gained extra steam with the popularity of ChatGPT, which has focused attention on Nvidia's dominant role in AI. The public battle to dominate the AI space started late last year with the launch of Microsoft Corp-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT, and spurred tech heavyweights from Alphabet to China's Baidu Inc to trumpet their own offerings.
Meta made its code available for noncommercial use. Groq used Meta's model but stripped out the code that was included in order to make the model run on an Nvidia chip, Groq CEO Jonathan Ross told Reuters.
Groq then ran that model through the Groq Compiler which automatically adds specific code for it to run on its own computing system. Ross said the company's goal is to make it easy to move models from Nvidia's chips to its own. He said that the Groq system can eliminate engineering effort every time changes are made to the LlaMA or other models to get it to work on the chips.
Meta Platforms didn't want to say anything. In October of this year, the company launched a set of free software tools for AI applications that allow switching back and forth between Nvidia and AMD chips, a goal that the company has been working on to make it easier for developers to use non-Nvidia chips.