A look at independent AI hardware and software vendor SambaNova’s open source strategy

AI hardware and software provider SambaNova Systems seeks to put enterprise customers in charge of their data while using open source models.

A smaller competitor of AI hardware vendor Nvidia, the AI vendor is trying to distinguish itself by helping enterprises train and deploy large models that they can't train on Nvidia's systems.

"What we try to focus on is how do we actually create a hardware platform that allows these companies to take these hard problems where the models are really big and deploy them in a reasonable way," co-founder and CEO Rodrigo Liang said on the Targeting AI podcast from TechTarget Editorial.

One way the vendor does this is by focusing on open source models.

"What we decided to do some years ago was [go] fully into open source," Liang said. "We want to open the model so that everybody at any given point in time can look at the entire model and how it was trained."

SambaNova introduced Sambaverse on March 6.

In SambaNova's terms, Sambaverse is a playground and API where developers can test available open source large language models from a single endpoint and compare their responses for any given application.

The new playground comes one week after the vendor unveiled Samba-1, a trillion-parameter generative AI model for the enterprise. The model comprises more than 50 open source generative AI models.

Esther Ajao is a TechTarget Editorial news writer covering artificial intelligence software and systems. Shaun Sutner is a journalist with 35 years of experience, including 25 years as a reporter for daily newspapers. He is a senior news director for TechTarget Editorial's information management team, covering AI, unified communications software, analytics and data management technology. Together, they host the Targeting AI podcast.