AI chip startup Groq has announced the creation of a new division, Groq Systems. The focus of this division is to significantly broaden its customer and developer ecosystem, catering to organizations, including government agencies, interested in integrating Groq’s high-performance chips into their existing data centers or building new ones with Groq processors.
To bolster its capabilities in this expansion, Groq has acquired Definitive Intelligence, a Palo Alto-based firm specializing in business-oriented AI solutions. These solutions include chatbots, data analytics tools, and documentation builders.
Sunny Madra, the CEO of Definitive Intelligence, now leads GroqCloud, Groq’s cloud platform offering hardware documentation, code samples, and self-serve API access to the company’s cloud-hosted accelerators.
Jonathan Ross, Groq’s co-founder and CEO, expressed the company’s commitment to creating an accessible and affordable AI economy for anyone with innovative ideas. The acquisition of Definitive Intelligence brings in expertise in AI solutions and go-to-market strategies, aligning with Groq’s mission.
Definitive Intelligence, founded in 2022 by Sunny Madra and Gavin Sherry, offers a range of business-oriented GenAI products, including OpenAssistants (open-source libraries for AI chatbot development) and Advisor (a visualization generator connecting to enterprise and public databases). One standout tool is Pioneer, an autonomous data science agent designed for various data analytics tasks, including predictive modeling.
Groq, emerging from stealth in 2016, is developing an LPU (language processing unit) inference engine. Claiming that its LPU can run large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4 at 10 times the speed, Groq is making waves in the custom AI chip market.
Notably, Jonathan Ross is renowned for his role in inventing Google’s tensor processing unit (TPU), a custom AI accelerator chip used for model training and execution.
This acquisition marks Groq’s second, following the acquisition of Maxeler Technologies in 2022, a high-performance compute and AI infrastructure solutions firm. Groq’s entrance into the custom AI chip market signals intense competition, and the formation of Groq Systems suggests a strategic move to establish dominance before competitors can catch up. The industry now watches for further developments as Groq strengthens its position in the dynamic AI landscape.