AI startup accuses Facebook of stealing code designed to speed up machine learning models on ordinary CPUs

An AI startup is suing Facebook and one of its employees for allegedly stealing proprietary software that allows machine learning workloads to run faster on standard processors, eliminating the need for more expensive custom hardware. Neural Magic, founded in 2017 by Nir Shavit and Alex Matveev, describes itself as a "no-hardware AI" company. Instead of relying on GPU chips that are able to crunch through matrix maths operations to run machine-learning models quickly, the Boston-based upstart employs nifty software tricks to achieve similar speeds on CPUs. Court documents filed (PDF) in the District Court of Massachusetts last week claim that Neural Magic's first employee, Aleksandar Zlateski, breached the non-disclosure and non-competition agreement he signed when he joined as the company's technology director. Zlateski left to join Facebook and allegedly stole his former employer's secret algorithms to give to his new team. That code, describing how to perform low-precision matrix multiplication to run trained computer vision models, was then published by Facebook engineers on GitHub last year in November.