Deci.AI’s founders Jonathan Elial COO (left), Yonatan Giefman CEO and Ran El Yaniv- Chief scientist. – Credit Deci
Nvidia, a chip maker best known for its video/graphics cards, is acquiring two Israeli startups: Run:ai and Deci AI. And yes, as their names imply they both deal with artificial intelligence. Run:ai was already bought out for an undisclosed amount, but Israel’s Calcalist reported that the deal could be for as much as $700 million and that a deal to acquire Deci AI is close at hand.
The moves make sense, especially when it comes to Deci AI. Just last month it was widely reported that Microsoft was looking to Deci to help it develop AI tech in order to better compete with OpenAI. Now Nvidia will get that technology.
Founded in 2019 by CEO Dr. Yonatan Geifman, Ran El-Yaniv, and COO Jonathan Elial, a former senior Google researcher, Deci AI offers an end-to-end deep learning acceleration platform, which the company says allows AI developers “build, optimize, and deploy faster and more accurate models for any environment, including cloud, edge, or mobile.”
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The platform is powered by Deci’s Automated Neural Architecture Construction (AutoNAC) technology, an algorithmic optimization engine that squeezes maximum utilization out of any hardware. The AutoNAC engine contains a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) component that redesigns a given trained model’s architecture to optimally improve its inference performance (throughput, latency, memory, etc.) for specific target hardware while preserving its baseline accuracy.
While GPUs have traditionally been the hardware of choice for running convolutional neural networks (CNNs), explains Deci, CPUs, already more commonly utilized for various computing tasks, would serve as a much cheaper alternative. Although it is possible to run deep learning inference on CPUs, generally they are significantly less powerful than GPUs. Consequently, deep learning models typically perform 3-10X slower on a CPU than on a GPU.
Deci AI says that its tech closes the gap significantly between GPU and CPU performance for CNNs and it boasts that tasks that previously could not be carried out on a CPU because they were too resource intensive are now possible.
Founded in 2018 by CEO Omri Geller and CTO Dr. Ronen Dar who met duras students in engineering at Tel Aviv University, Run:ai helps companies execute on their AI initiatives “quickly, while keeping budgets under control, virtualizing expensive hardware resources in order to pool, share and allocate your resources efficiently.”
“Run:ai has been a close collaborator with NVIDIA since 2020 and we share a passion for helping our customers make the most of their infrastructure,” said Omri Geller, Run:ai co-founder and CEO. “We’re thrilled to join NVIDIA and look forward to continuing our journey together.”
