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Tech


MEET SHARON ZHOU, THE AI FOUNDER DOING JUST FINE WITHOUT NVIDIA'S CHIPS

Hasan Chowdhury
Apr 1, 2024, 5:47 AM ET
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Read in app
Angle down icon An icon in the shape of an angle pointing down. Sharon Zhou,
Lamini AI CEO and cofounder Sharon Zhou
 * Everyone in AI has been seemingly falling over themselves for Nvidia's chips.
 * Everyone that is, except Sharon Zhou.
 * The Lamini AI CEO has been using rival AMD's GPUs to take her startup
   forward.

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Tech CEOs with big plans for artificial intelligence spent a bunch of time
scrambling around in search of Nvidia chips last year.

The Santa Clara giant's chips, known as GPUs, became the hottest property of the
generative AI boom. Figures as powerful as Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman raced
to secure supplies of the vital computing resources needed to power apps like
ChatGPT.

However, there's one AI boss who hasn't put herself at the mercy of Nvidia's
billionaire leader Jensen Huang, and his $2.2 trillion GPU empire. Meet Sharon
Zhou.

The 30-year-old has had quite the career.



She's the first person to major in both classics and computer science at
Harvard. She received a Ph.D. in generative AI at Stanford under machine
learning pioneer Andrew Ng, became an adjunct professor at the university, and
has made time for online teaching and angel investing. If that wasn't enough,
she was also asked to be on the early founding team of Anthropic, the OpenAI
rival that just raised an extra $2.75 billion from Amazon.

Her ambitions have taken her in a slightly different direction, however, as
she's now forging her own path forward by taking charge of an AI startup of her
own.


WHO NEEDS NVIDIA?

In April last year, Zhou and her cofounder Greg Diamos, based in Palo Alto,
brought their new startup, Lamini AI, out of stealth. Its main ambition was to
offer a platform that makes it easy for enterprises to train and create
customized large language models with "just a few lines of code."

That could mean taking a foundation model like GPT from OpenAI and making it
easy for an enterprise to fine-tune that model with its own data. "What we're
doing is making it essentially possible for every enterprise to have OpenAI's
infrastructure but in-house," Zhou said.



An equally interesting revelation came months later, however.

In September, Zhou revealed that Lamini's platform had been building customized
LLMs with customers over the past year by exclusively using GPUs from Nvidia's
main rival, AMD, the chip giant run by Huang's cousin, Lisa Su.

It was a big deal given that almost everyone seemed to be exclusively obsessed
with H100 — GPUs that Nvidia has struggled to meet the demand of amid supply
constraints. Lamini's reveal even came with a video of Zhou teasing Nvidia about
the shortage.

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As Zhou acknowledges, though, it wasn't an easy decision to look away from the
thing everyone in generative AI has been desperate for. "The decision-making
process was a long one," she said. "It was not a trivial, small one."



A few things helped the decision. For one, her cofounder Diamos played a key
role in helping make the realization that GPUs other than those from Nvidia work
perfectly well.

As a former Nvidia software architect, Diamos understood that while GPU hardware
was vital for getting top performance out of AI models — he was, after all, the
coauthor of a paper on "scaling laws" that showed the importance of computing
power — software was important too.

Diamos was witness to that having worked on CUDA, the software first developed
by Nvidia in the 2000s. It makes using AI models with GPUs like the H100 and
Nvidia's new Blackwell chip, as simple as a plug-and-play system.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

So it became clear that if another company could build a similar software
ecosystem around its GPUs, there'd be no reason they couldn't compete with
Nvidia. Fortunately for them, after consulting with Diamos, according to Zhou,
AMD was on its way to building a rival system that they would eventually test.



"Greg and I were just jamming on things, so this has been years in the making,
and then once the prototypes worked we were just like let's just double down on
this," Zhou said.

More broadly, Zhou recognizes that businesses are so "excited to use LLMs," but
many may not want to — or simply can't afford to — wait around for Nvidia to
shore up enough supply of its GPUs to meet the demand.

It's another reason AMD has proven so valuable to her ambitions. Thanks to its
GPUs being more available, Zhou was confident that Lamini could offer
"infrastructure that makes meeting that skyrocketing demand" for LLMs possible.

"This is because Lamini fully utilizes LLM compute at 10x performance and makes
it possible to scale quickly without supply constraints, by offering
vendor-agnostic compute options, i.e. it's indiscernible to customers to run
Lamini on Nvidia and AMD GPUs," she explained.



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No wonder the company is ready to double down on AMD. In January, Zhou shared an
image to X of the MI300X — AMD's new chip first unveiled in December by CEO Su
as the "highest performing accelerator in the world" — live in production at
Lamini.

Nvidia's Huang might be leading one of the most powerful companies in Silicon
Valley now, but the competition is coming for him. Or as Zhou said of AMD: "They
have a real horse in this race."


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