In order to avoid those pesky laws and regulations from getting in the way of some good old-fashioned acquisition fun, Nvidia has struck a “licensing deal” with AI Chip startup Groq founded by former Google engineer Jonathan Ross (who was the co-creator of the TPU: Google’s AI chip). Groq chips which are called LPUs, can apparently do inference for LLMs at 10x the speed for 1/10th of the energy usage.
This reminds me of how Zuckerberg dominated social media by buying every app the even remotely threatened to displace Facebook. Platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp ended up being just as popular as Facebook, so I guess that was a winning strategy considering that Meta is such a dominate player in online advertising.
Here is an article with a deeper dive on this deal…
