NLP Cloud, one of the most exciting AI-as-a-Service platforms to emerge in recent years, has begun adding models powered by Graphcore IPUs to its commercial offering.
Starting with the popular speech-to-text model Whisper, NLP Cloud will add further language models, running on Graphcore hardware, in response to growing customer demand for fast, efficient API-based AI.
The current implementation makes use of IPUs hosted by Gcore, a Graphcore cloud compute partner.
NLP Cloud joins a growing list of AIaaS businesses building on IPUs, including Paperspace, Pienso, and AlephAlpha. In turn, these services are enabling the creation of new AI-centric startups, while helping long-standing businesses unlock the AI advantage.
“Graphcore IPUs have distinguished themselves as a powerful, efficient AI compute platform and the leading challenger to GPUs,” said Julien Salinas, Founder and CTO of NLP Cloud.
“For NLP Cloud users, moving to a model running on IPUs is completely seamless; there are no code-changes or other adjustments to be made, just outstanding performance that they and their business can rely on.”
Essential AI toolkit
NLP Cloud gives developers easy access to a wide range of off-the-shelf and user fine-tuned models, via a convenient pay-as-you-go API.
Since its founding in 2020, NLP Cloud has become the AI backbone for companies around the world that are building products and services across a broad range of use cases spanning translation, chatbots and conversational AI, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, sentiment analysis, copywriting and more.
Customers include Deloitte, Dell, GlaxoSmithKline, GE, Lufthansa and PWC.
The combination of Europe-based NLP Cloud and GCore’s European datacenters makes the new IPU solution particularly well suited to organisation seeking to comply with EU data sovereignty rules.
Commercial momentum
The decision by NLP Cloud to start offering IPU-powered models marks the first time that the company has adopted a compute platform other than GPUs.
"Now that AI is moving into the commercial realm, we’re seeing AI-as-a-Service companies like NLP Cloud choosing Graphcore systems for a variety of reasons including the computational efficiency of a made-for-AI processor, the IPU’s ability to open up new AI techniques, and the price-performance advantage that we’re able to deliver,” said Nigel Toon, Graphcore CEO.
Developers can register their interest in using IPU-powered models on NLP Cloud by emailing contact@nlpcloud.com.
.png?width=1440&name=NLPCloud%20blog%20header%20(2).png "Graphcore and NLP Cloud logos")
