Groq is a startup developing chips that run GenAI models faster than traditional hardware, with an eye on the enterprise and public sector.
Today, Groq announced the creation of a new division, Groq Systems, focused on significantly expanding its customer and developer ecosystem. Groq Systems' scope is to serve organizations, including government agencies, that want to add Groq chips to existing data centers or build new data centers using Groq processors.
In forming the new division, Groq acquired Definitive Intelligence, a Palo Alto-based company that provides a wide range of business-oriented AI solutions, including chatbots, data analysis tools, and document builders. Sunny Madra, CEO of Definitive Intelligence, currently supports Groq hardware, his documentation, code samples, and his Groq cloud platform, which provides self-service API access to the company's cloud-hosted accelerators. leads GroqCloud.
“At Groq, we are committed to building an AI economy that is accessible and affordable to anyone with a great idea,” Groq co-founder and CEO Jonathan Ross said in a press release. “We are excited to welcome Sunny and his team at Definitive Intelligence to help us achieve this mission… The Definitive team has expertise in AI solutions and go-to-market strategies. Has a proven dedication to sharing knowledge with the community.”
Madra co-founded Definitive Intelligence in 2022 with Gavin Sherry, a former director of engineering at EMC. Prior to the launch of Definitive Intelligence, Madra and Shelley co-launched Autonomic, a cloud-based platform for connecting mobility systems. Autonomic was acquired by Ford in 2018.
Definitive Intelligence offers several business-oriented GenAI products, including OpenAssistants, a collection of open-source libraries for developing AI chatbots, and Advisor, a visualization generator that connects to both enterprise and public databases. I am. One of Definitive's key tools is Pioneer, an “autonomous data science agent” designed to handle a variety of data analysis tasks, including predictive modeling.
Prior to the acquisition, Definitive Intelligence had raised $25.5 million in venture capital.
“The world is now realizing how important fast inference is to generative AI,” Madra said in an emailed statement. “At Groq, we are providing developers with the speed, low latency, and efficiency they need to deliver on the promise of generative AI. I have been a huge fan of Groq since I first met Jonathan in 2016, and I am proud to say that we are providing the fastest I'm excited to join him and his Groq team in their quest to bring inference engines to the world.”
Groq, which emerged from stealth in 2016, creates what it calls an LPU (short for “Language Processing Unit”) inference engine. The company claims its LPU can run existing large-scale language models, which are similar in architecture to OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-4, 10 times faster.
Ross' claim to fame is inventing the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), Google's custom AI accelerator chip used to train and run models.
Definitive Intelligence is Groq's second acquisition in 2022, following Maxeler Technologies, a high-performance computing and AI infrastructure solutions company.