The open-source AI software startup Nod.AI will be acquired by AMD, the chipmaker said on Tuesday, in order to grow its AI software business.
Nod.The business claims that AI, or Nod Labs, develops open-source technologies “for future AI systems” and that its primary area of expertise is reinforcement learning, a system that “learns” through trial and error.
The purchase is a component of AMD’s “AI growth plan,” which the company thinks will help it better compete against rival chipmaker Nvidia, whose sales increased by more than 100% year over year for the quarter that ended on July 30, 2023. While revenue fell by 18% during the same period, AMD nonetheless outperformed experts’ predictions for sales and profit.
The acquisition of Nod.ai will, according to Vamsi Boppana, SVP of AMD’s AI department, “substantially expand our capacity to provide AI customers with open software that allows them to simply deploy highly performant AI models customised for AMD hardware.”
The CEO of the firm, Anush Elangovan, worked as a lead engineer at Cisco and was a member of the first Chromebook team at Google before starting Nod in 2013. The co-founder and chief technology officer of Nod, Harsh Menon, was formerly employed by Larry Page-backed electric aircraft manufacturer Kitty Hawk, which will cease operations in 2022.
Nod Labs was initially advertised as an artificial intelligence hardware firm specialising in wearables that detect motion and recognise gestures, such as Bluetooth-enabled rings for gaming. (Consider using your thumb and forefinger to make a real-world hand gesture to fire a gun in a virtual reality game.) The startup received millions of dollars in funding from VC firms including Menlo Ventures and Sequoia Capital, and team members are said to have come from companies like Apple, Google, Samsung, and others.
Source (CNBC)
