Hardware-based Artificial Intelligence Company Nervana Systems Gets Substantial Funding Boost

 Artificial Intelligence  

Nervana Systems, a start-up looking to develop artificial intelligence hardware has just raised a considerable investment.  The company is developing specialized hardware for machine learning algorithms.

Nervana Systems, a San Diego-based startup that is focusing on hardware — not software — to boost the performance of artificial intelligence algorithms, just raised $600,000 from investors according to TechCrunch.

The main investors are Ali and Hadi Partovi, Y Combinator’s Sam Altman and Geoff Ralston, Scott Banister and Allen & Co.

"The algorithms exist and they’re getting better, but hardware requires much higher performance than that. It’s already the bottleneck."

Other investors included Owen Van Natta, Eric Baker, Google veteran Farzad Khosrowshahi, Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, Dropbox vice president Aditya Agrawal and Ruchi Sanghvi, and SV Angel.

They’re developing specialized hardware for machine learning algorithms, unlike Google-acquired Deep Mind or Vicarious, which focus on software.

“The algorithms exist and they’re getting better,” said Naveen Rao, a computational neuroscientist who co-founded the company. “But hardware requires much higher performance than that. It’s already the bottleneck.”

Related articles NASA Examines Quantum Artificial Intelligence  Google Ads Another Big Name In Artificial Intelligence To Its Employee Roster  AI System Breaks CATCHA Turing Test

According to the Nervana Systems website the company, "Is bringing unprecedented scale and simplicity to the application of brain-inspired algorithms. Deep learning has emerged as the leading strategy for making sense of a wide variety of data but is very computationally intensive. We are developing a scalable hardware solution to solve these types of problems. By making unsupervised learning dramatically faster and more scalable, customers at all levels can derive meaningful insights from their data, an ability previously available only to an elite few companies."

Rao worked at Sun Microsystems on UltraSparc processors, then went on to work at a number of other companies before he landed at Qualcomm, where he was part of the neuromorphic research group investigating artificial neural computation.

The study of the human brain is informing advanced artificial intelligence algorithms that can manipulate vast sets of data. Rao said that deep learning could be applied to all sorts of problems from Netflix data for recommendations to complex drug interaction models.

Nervana is focusing on building general-purpose central processing units, that will require less data to be be moved back and forth between parallel processors as they are processed.

Liz Gannes at Re/code writes that the real opportunity of Nervana is that by making deep learning more accessible, it will hopefully help researchers and companies make more interesting breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.



SOURCE  TechCrunch

By 33rd Square

Embed