According to Jonathan Cohen, Vice President of Applied Research at NVIDIA, in the world of AI Research, development speeds are limited by available computing resources.
“The currency of AI researchers these days is how many GPUs they have access to, and that’s much more true at Nvidia than any other company,” Cohen said in an interview with the Nvidia developer.
Cohen led the team responsible for developing models for Nvidia’s Llama Nemotron family. Released in March this year, they represent the company’s entry into the world of “inference” AI systems.
The speed at which the models were put together was amazing, Cohen said, “within a month or two.” He partially praises the efficiency of their development to other workers willing to sacrifice their processing power.
“So there were a lot of researchers who were very selflessly agreeing to abandon their computing so that they could train these llama-nemotoron models as quickly as we do,” he said.
Cohen also attributed the speed of development to Nvidia’s company-wide culture of prioritizing key projects regardless of current team goals.
“How do teams do things they’ve never done before? Some of our corporate culture calls them “flocks.” “And every manager who has people who may be able to contribute, says, “Is this new thing more important than what everyone on my team is doing now?”
If the manager doesn’t spare someone, they “contribute” in-person reporting to new priorities.
“Llama Nemotron has become a very cross-discipline, cross-team effort,” Cohen added. “We had people from the entire company working together without a formal organizational structure.”
Llama Nemotron needed a series of sacrifices, Cohen said from both the power and personnel perspective of computing, but people were able to secure their own interests for the overall profits.
“It was really great to see great leadership,” he said. “There were a lot of sacrifices people made and a lot of very egoless decisions that put them together, and that’s great.”
Nvidia did not respond to a request for comment by Business Insider just before its publication.
