Groq, a startup developing chips to run artificial intelligence production models faster than conventional hardware, has its eye on the enterprise — and the public sector.
Today, Groq announced that it is creating a new division – Groq Systems – focused on greatly expanding its customer and developer ecosystem. Within Groq Systems’ remit, it serves organizations, including government agencies, that wish to add Groq chips to existing data centers or build new data centers using Groq processors.
In creating the new unit, Groq acquired Definitive Intelligence, a Palo Alto-based company that offers a range of business AI solutions, including chatbots, data analytics tools and documentation builders. Definitive Intelligence CEO Sunny Madra now leads GroqCloud, Groq’s cloud platform that provides Groq hardware documentation, code samples, and self-service API access to the company’s cloud-hosted accelerators.
“At Groq, we’re committed to making an AI economy accessible and affordable for anyone with a bright idea,” Groq co-founder and CEO Jonathan Ross said in a press release. “We are excited to welcome Sunny and his team from Definitive Intelligence to help us achieve this mission… The Definitive team has expertise in AI solutions and go-to-market strategies, as well as a proven commitment to sharing knowledge with the community. “
Madra co-founded Definitive Intelligence in 2022 with Gavin Sherry, a former director of engineering at EMC. Prior to the launch of Definitive Intelligence, Madra and Sherry co-launched Autonomic, a cloud-based platform for connecting mobility systems that Ford acquired in 2018.
Definitive Intelligence offers several business-oriented GenAI products, including OpenAssistants (a collection of open source libraries for developing AI chatbots) and Advisor (a visualization builder that connects to both business and public databases). One of Definitive’s flagship tools is Pioneer, an “autonomous data science agent” designed to handle various data analysis tasks, including predictive modeling.
Prior to the acquisition, Definitive Intelligence had raised $25.5 million in venture capital.
“The world is just now realizing how important high-speed inference is for productive artificial intelligence,” Madra said in an emailed statement. “At Groq, we give developers the speed, low latency and efficiency they need to deliver on the promise of genetic AI. I’ve been a big fan of Groq since I first met Jonathan in 2016, and I’m excited to join him and the Groq team in their quest to bring the world’s fastest inference engine.”
Groq, which emerged from stealth in 2016, builds what it calls an LPU (language processing unit) inference engine. The company claims its LPU can run existing large language models similar in architecture to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4 at 10x the speed.
Ross’s claim to fame is helping invent the tensor processing unit (TPU), Google’s custom AI accelerator chip used to train and run models.
Definitive Intelligence is Groq’s second acquisition after Maxeler Technologies, a high-performance computing infrastructure and artificial intelligence solutions company, in 2022. It may not be its last. The market for custom AI chips is highly competitive, and—to the extent that the definitive market telegraphs Groq’s plans—Groq clearly intends to establish a position before its competitors have a chance.
