UCL spinout bags £10M to make AI ‘super brains’ for 100x faster LLM training

Oriole Networks, a UCL spinout, has raised £10mn in seed funding to construct AI “tremendous brains” that promise to speed up the coaching of Massive Language Fashions (LLMs). 

Based in 2023 by UCL scientists, the startup has developed a brand new technique that harnesses the facility of  gentle to attach 1000’s of AI chips. This leads to a community of chips, the place the facility of every particular person GPU is mixed to kind a “tremendous mind.” 

In response to James Regan, CEO at Oriole Networks, this “permits the direct connection of a really massive variety of nodes enabling it to perform as a single machine.” 

The novelty of the strategy lies within the deployment of customized light-based transmission and switching protocols. 

“These protocols ship a major discount within the energy consumption required for equal scale community implementations,” Regan informed TNW.

“This community implementation will improve the effectivity and interconnectivity of the community, thereby offering a major enchancment to the compute efficiency of a given AI compute system.” 

Oriole Networks says that this tremendous mind can prepare LLMs 100x sooner and with a thousandth of the latency, whereas bettering vitality consumption by 40 occasions.

The startup believes that its know-how can’t solely deal with the issues over AI’s massive energy demand and consumption, but in addition speed up time-critical duties, similar to algorithmic buying and selling. Oriole Networks envisions important advantages particularly for firms working with AI, in addition to for knowledge centres.

The funding will likely be used to progress the know-how from lab demonstration to buyer trials in a deployed optical knowledge community. The spherical was co-led by UCL Know-how Fund, Clear Progress Fund, XTX Ventures, and Dorilton Ventures. It was additionally backed by Innovate UK Investor Partnership.

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