Meta releases AI software tools that will make it easier to switch between Nvidia and AMD chips.
Kanter also said that this new Meta AI platform would be “good for customer choice.”
Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms Inc. (META.O), announced on Monday that it has released a new set of free software tools for artificial intelligence applications. These tools could make it easier for developers to switch between different chips.
Meta’s new open-source AI platform is based on an open-source machine learning framework called PyTorch. It can help code run up to 12 times faster on Nvidia Corp.’s (NVDA.O) flagship A100 chip or up to 4 times faster on Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s (AMD.O) MI250 chip, the company said.
In a blog post, Meta said that the software’s flexibility is just as important as the speed boost.
Chipmakers are fighting over software more and more as they try to build an ecosystem of developers who will use their chips. So far, the most popular platform for AI work has been Nvidia’s CUDA platform.
But once developers customise their code for Nvidia chips, it is hard to run it on graphics processing units, or GPUs, from Nvidia’s competitors like AMD. Meta said that the software was made so that it was easy to switch between chips and not get stuck in one.
In a blog post, Meta said, “The unified GPU back-end support gives deep learning developers more hardware vendor options with minimal migration costs.”
Nvidia and AMD did not respond right away when asked for comments.
Meta’s software is made for a type of AI work called “inference.” The inference is made when machine learning algorithms that have been trained on a lot of data are asked to make quick decisions, like figuring out if a picture is of a cat or a dog.
“This is a piece of software that works on more than one platform. It also shows how important software is, especially when it comes to using neural networks in machine learning for inference. David Kanter, who started MLCommons, a group that measures how fast AI is, said this.
Kanter also said that this new Meta AI platform would be “good for customer choice.”
