Facebook parent Meta launches AI software tools to help speed up work

By Jane Lanhee Lee and Stephen Nellis

(Reuters) -Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc said on Monday it has launched a new set of free software tools for artificial intelligence applications that could help speed up the performance of underlying chips.

Meta’s new open-source AI platform is based on the open-source PyTorch machine learning framework, and can help code run up to 12 times faster on Nvidia Corp’s flagship A100 chip or up to four times faster on Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s MI50 chip, it said.

Software has become a key battleground for chipmakers seeking to build up an ecosystem of developers to use their chips. Nvidia’s CUDA platform has been the most popular so far for artificial intelligence work.

Meta, which also uses Nvidia chips in its data centers, has long been a proponent for open-source hardware and software.

(Reporting By Jane Lanhee Lee; editing by Jonathan Oatis)