Key Facebook Engineer Departs To Start Deep Learning Hardware Company

Serkan Piantino, a longtime Facebook engineer who helped to create its artificial intelligence research lab, has left the social networking firm to start a company focused on making it easier for developers to access the best AI processing hardware. His new startup, called Top 1 Networks, will offer customers access to the latest Nvidia graphics processing units (or GPUs) as a cloud service, much like Amazon and others offer cloud computing services. Nvidia's GPUs have taken off in deep learning, a flavor of AI where the computer teaches itself how to do specific tasks. Major cloud service providers (Amazon, Microsoft, Google) already offer access to GPUs in their data centers, but Piantino said it's usually older hardware. "These cloud providers are pretty far behind," said Piantino, who spoke to FORBES for the first time about his new company over the phone.