Liu Weiqiang, founder and CEO of Kneron.
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Artificial intelligence chip startup Kneron launched its next-generation product on Wednesday as it looks to cash in on corporate interest in artificial intelligence and provide an alternative to giants such as its own. Nvidia and AMD.
The Taiwanese company, which is backed by US chip giant Qualcomm and iPhone assembler Foxconn, unveiled its second-generation “edge GPT” server, the KNEO 330.
GPT, or Generative Pre-Training Transformer, refers to an artificial intelligence algorithm that can generate text and images after being trained on a large amount of data. Examples include OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Today, however, many companies looking to use generative AI capabilities and applications rely on the cloud presence of giants like Microsoft and Amazon. These so-called “hyperscalers” are buying large amounts of chips from companies like Nvidia to train these large-scale artificial intelligence models in data centers running complex servers.
Kneron believes that enterprises will not always want to rely on these cloud giants for their artificial intelligence needs.
Instead, the KNEO 330 is targeted at businesses that want to run their own AI applications on their own premises, rather than relying on servers located elsewhere and owned by one of the big cloud vendors.
“We see strong market demand from large high-tech companies, medical centers or financial institutions who care about their privacy,” Kneron CEO Albert Liu told CNBC ahead of the product launch. “They don’t want to upload it to OpenAI.”
Liu believes that companies may not want to hand over data to third parties to use their AI tools. Instead, with Kneron’s technology, companies can build their own AI applications using the company’s on-premises servers.
Just days before Kneron was released, Nvidia and AMD both launched their latest AI chips, and both companies seemed to be accelerating their releases. Nvidia and AMD’s products are aimed at the tech giants’ large data centers, which can train large-scale artificial intelligence models.
On Wednesday, Kneron also announced that its latest KL830 processor chip will appear in new PCs. This poses a challenge to companies such as Intel and AMD that make PC chips. The KL830 will allow a PC to run artificial intelligence applications on the device rather than being connected to the internet. The idea is that this will improve privacy since the data is not connected to the internet.
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