CogX Honors Trailblazing NLP Advancements by Pienso and Graphcore

Pienso Engineering

Pienso and partner hardware accelerator company Graphcore wins the CogX 2023 award for blazing fast inference.

Over the past 6 years, CogX has championed practitioners of AI and emerging technology from around the world at their annual festival in London.

This year, Graphcore and Pienso’s groundbreaking Packing work is recognized as the best innovation of 2023 in the NLP category. 
 

For Pienso users, it’s not enough to shrink the distance between their own subject matter expertise and the underlying large language model.

The experience of interacting with data must not only be interactive, but fast. Very fast.

“It’s very hard to build reliable, scalable production-caliber products using generative AI. Hardware accelerators, GPUs specifically, continue to be expensive and scarce. Scarcity fuels opportunity – in this case, for end-to-end AI platforms that optimize performance at either the hardware or the software layer. In this partnership, we’ve done both and we couldn’t be more excited about what comes next,” says Karthik Dinakar, Pienso’s co-founder and Chief Technologist.

Scarcity fuels opportunity – in this case, for end-to-end AI platforms that optimize performance at either the hardware or the software layer. In this partnership, we’ve done both

Karthik DinakarPienso co-founder and CTO

To achieve that user experience, organizations look to AI hardware accelerators, but they are hard to find and expensive to procure.

Graphcore makes IPUs – Intelligence Processing Units – uniquely designed for AI training and inference workloads.

Because they’re designed for AI, they are faster than GPUs to start with, but that’s only the beginning.

Together, we set out to optimize the Pienso experience for speed, and we succeeded.

Working at both the hardware and software level, our technologies complement one another to deliver AI-derived insights up to 35x faster than the same workload running Nvidia GPUs. Read more about how we optimized our technologies to deliver these benchmarks in our previous post.

CogX judges had this to say in their announcement: “Pienso’s groundbreaking low-code/no-code platform is empowering business experts everywhere, merging intuitive AI with powerful hardware, and truly revolutionizing the way enterprises harness large language models for real-time insights. Their collaboration with Graphcore has transformed hours of workload into mere minutes, truly setting the gold standard in the world of interactive AI.”

Regarding our partnership, Graphcore CEO Nigel Toon put it this way: “Innovations in artificial intelligence can sometimes feel like a solution looking for a problem. Graphcore’s work with Pienso is marked by being incredibly customer-centric – we are giving users tools that deliver real, immediate business benefits. In the course of developing our joint offering, we’ve done some breakthrough work, developing new approaches to accelerated AI compute that show off the capabilities of the Graphcore IPU, but always with the goal of delivering data insights faster and more efficiently for our customers.”

We are giving users tools that deliver real, immediate business benefits.

Nigel ToonGraphcore CEO

Benefitting the end user by delivering interactive AI that intersects and accelerates their daily work rather than complicates it, is a north star for Pienso product development.


“We empower our users to fine-tune a large language model without even knowing they’re fine-tuning. Partnering with Graphcore, using IPUs, we’re delivering the experience people expect – answers and insights in seconds, not minutes or hours. Underlying our efforts is our shared belief that AI is most powerful when it is accessible to the largest number of people,” says Birago Jones, Pienso co-founder and Chief Executive.

Underlying our efforts with Graphcore is our shared belief that AI is most powerful when it is accessible to the most number of people.

Birago JonesPienso co-founder and CEO

Learn more about our Graphcore partnership and register for a complimentary pilot, with your own data.