@MaxForAI: According to SemiAnalysis @SemiAnalysis_, Jia Yangqing, former Facebook (now Meta) AI Architecture Director, Alibaba Vice President of Technology, President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Computing Platform, now founder and CEO of LeptonAI, and NVIDIA Vice President of System Software, @jiayq, has left NVIDIA.
Summary
Jia Yangqing, former Facebook AI Architecture Director and LeptonAI founder, left NVIDIA one year after NVIDIA acquired his startup team. According to SemiAnalysis, reasons include DGX Lepton's performance not meeting expectations and disagreements with Jensen Huang over open-source commitments.
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According to SemiAnalysis (@SemiAnalysis_), Jia Yangqing (@jiayq) — former Facebook (now Meta) AI Architecture Director, Alibaba Vice President of Technology, President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Computing Platform, founder and CEO of LeptonAI, and most recently VP of System Software at NVIDIA — has left NVIDIA.
This comes just shy of a year after Jensen Huang spent a whopping $700 million to acquire the 20-person startup team.
Earlier this month, another GPU startup, Hyperbolic (@hyperbolic_labs), announced that Jia Yangqing has joined as an advisor.
In its announcement, Hyperbolic stated that Jia will provide experience and support in areas such as AI systems, cloud infrastructure, GPU marketplace, multi-cloud orchestration, and GPU utilization improvement.
Currently, Jia’s social media profiles and LinkedIn still list him as being at NVIDIA.
Regarding the reason for his departure, SemiAnalysis says the operational performance of DGX Lepton fell short of Jensen Huang’s expectations.
But deeper issues involve disagreements between Jensen Huang and Jia Yangqing over open-source commitments for the project, as well as challenges in product execution and delivery.
Jensen Huang may have reversed his earlier decision to open-source DGX Lepton.
SemiAnalysis (@SemiAnalysis_):
BREAKING NEWS: The Founder/CEO of LeptonAI has left only a year after LeptonAI’s acquisition. This is quite shocking, as Jensen reportedly spent $700M acquiring LeptonAI. What did he see? DGX Lepton flopped and got nowhere near the success Jensen expected. 1/7🧵
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