Recently, Red Hat, the open-source software company owned by IBM, announced the acquisition of AI optimization startup Neural Magic. The specific terms of the deal have not been disclosed. Red Hat is dedicated to driving technological advancement and innovation in enterprises.
Neural Magic was founded in 2018 by MIT research scientist Alex Matveev and professor Nir Shavit. The company's software aims to optimize artificial intelligence models to run at speeds close to dedicated AI chips (such as TPUs) on common processors and GPUs. By running AI models on regular processors, Neural Magic's software can leverage larger memory, thereby enhancing performance.
In the field of AI optimization, many large tech companies and startups are actively competing, such as AMD and NeuReality, Deci, CoCoPie, among others. However, Neural Magic stands out by offering a free platform and a series of open-source tools, making it unique in the market.
So far, Neural Magic has secured $50 million in venture capital, with investors including Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates, Amdocs, Comcast Ventures, Pillar VC, and Ridgeline Ventures. Red Hat's CEO, Matt Hicks, expressed great interest in Neural Magic's achievements in the vLLM project. With Neural Magic, Red Hat will be able to provide an "enterprise-grade" stack based on vLLM, helping customers optimize and deploy models while ensuring full control over infrastructure and security.
Red Hat has already been involved in the vLLM project, using it to drive the operation of products like Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI and Red Hat OpenShift AI. Hicks noted that through the collaboration between Red Hat and Neural Magic, infrastructure partners can better scale AI across various platforms, and integration service provider partners can gain stronger inference capabilities and performance to better integrate with their products.
In his statement, Hicks mentioned, "AI workloads need to run in hybrid clouds where customer data resides, which requires flexible, standardized, and open platforms and tools, enabling organizations to choose environments, resources, and architectures that best fit their unique operational and data needs." This acquisition further propels Red Hat's dual development in open source and AI.
The news of Red Hat's acquisition of Neural Magic coincides with the company's announcement of a series of AI-related developments at the annual KubeCon computing conference in Salt Lake City. Red Hat also introduced the Climatik tool, developed in collaboration with Intel, Bloomberg, and IBM, aimed at optimizing the energy efficiency of data centers, and released new versions of its OpenShift AI and Device Edge development platforms.
Official Blog: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-acquire-neural-magic?intcmp=7015Y0000048mWDQAY
Key Points:
🌟 Red Hat acquires Neural Magic to optimize the running speed of AI models on common processors.
💰 Neural Magic, founded in 2018, has received $50 million in venture capital and offers free open-source tools.
🔧 The collaboration between Red Hat and Neural Magic will enhance its AI products and drive the development of open-source solutions.