For decades, CPU vendors would leapfrog each other running benchmarks such as SPEC and TPC, with Intel, SUN SPARC, DEC Alpha, MIPS, and IBM POWER showing off the latest silicon. However the AI accelerator race has been a one-company story since the beginning, with NVIDIA far in front of a small pack of earnest wannabe's. With MLPerf 2.0, that has all changed. In a game of leapfrog, the winner is often determined by the timing of the comparison; we expect the next-gen Hopper GPU will retake the crown, but this time will not keep it. If you are tight for time, we suggest you skip the analyses and jump to the section on software near the end; that's where this battle will be won or lost.

Ex-Nervana Systems engineers made the jump from a hardware-centric approach to efficient training to pushing better insight into optimization of models and systems. Nervana Systems was one of the first AI chip startups to generate big buzz, culminating in an acquisition by Intel in summer, 2016. The startup's co-founder and CEO, Naveen Rao, moved into the VP role for the AI products group while fellow Nervana engineers, including Hanlin Tang (who led development for the Neon software stack for Nervana's devices) also stuck around Intel focusing on practical AI algorithms and federal programs. Rao and Tang, among others, are together again with a new startup, MosaicML, which came out of stealth today with $37 million in funding from a wide range of VC partners, including Lux Capital, Future Ventures, E14, and others. The target is machine learning training and as the world quickly learned, optimized deep learning has far less to do with efficient, high performance hardware than the VCs believed in the 2014-2021 frame.

Former Intel Corp. executives Naveen Rao and Hanlin Tang have gotten back into the startup game, announcing the launch of a new company called MosaicML today that promises to optimize machine learning. MosaicML is exiting stealth mode armed with $37 million in funding round led by Lux Capital DCVC, Future Ventures, Playground Global, AME, Correlation, E14 and a few angel investors. Rao (pictured, far left) told Reuters he's aiming to revolutionize machine learning model training by offering his company's expertise and techniques "as-a-service" to organizations looking to develop extremely complex artificial intelligence models. The company's stated mission is to help its customers and the AI community improve prediction accuracy, lower costs and save time. MosaicML will do that by providing tools that make more efficient training methods available to data scientists. The MosaicML Explorer can help developers to explore and understand the potential tradeoffs among time, performance and costs associated with different cloud services and hardware options for training machine learning models.

A former head of artificial intelligence products at Intel has started a company to help companies cut overhead costs on AI systems. Naveen Rao, CEO and co-founder of MosaicML, previously led Nervana Systems, which was acquired by Intel for $350m. But like many Intel acquisitions, the marriage didn't pan out, and Intel killed the Nervana AI chip last year, after which Rao left the company. MosaicML's open source tools focus on implementing AI systems based on cost, training time, or speed-to-results. They do so by analyzing an AI problem relative to the neural net settings and hardware, which then paves an efficient path to generate optimal settings while reducing electric costs.