Graphcore is continuing to build out its AI applications and services ecosystem, launching a new partnership with AI platform company Pienso to make its powerful text analysis solution available on IPUs in the cloud.
Pienso uses natural language processing to help businesses extract actionable insights from written text such as comments posted on social media, transcripts of customer service phone calls, news articles and documents.
Pienso + Graphcore is aimed at enterprise users such as media and entertainment companies, consumer internet - including social networks and e-commerce businesses, telecoms providers, and anyone trying to get high quality, high speed insights from large amounts of written data.
No coding or ML skills are needed to build and run models in Pienso, meaning it can be used by subject matter experts and strategic decision makers within a business, removing reliance on in-demand AI engineers.
The IPU advantage
Thanks to the IPU’s designed-for-AI architecture and world leading performance in Natural Language Processing, Pienso runs considerably faster and with finer granularity and precision on IPUs than on other compute platforms; a performance gain that makes an already powerful solution truly transformative for its users.
Gone are the long wait times associated with creating and deploying AI models. Valuable business insights can be delivered and acted on in minutes, and for businesses working with very large volumes of real-time data flow, Pienso + Graphcore can analyse tens of millions of conversations every day.
“Speed supercharges experimentation,” says Pienso’s Chief Technology Officer Karthik Dinakar. “The faster Pienso users can develop and deploy and then tune and re-deploy models, the better the models, the sharper the insights, and the sooner they can act on that information. This is especially true for non-technical users who have been disenfranchised from AI.”
“For anyone dealing with high volume, firehose-type content feeds - such as social media companies or large customer-service operations, the IPU performance advantage is particularly valuable in helping them react to real-time situations.”
Critical response time
One application for the Pienso + Graphcore platform is content moderation on specialist social networks, where the ability to analyse vast amounts of text quickly plays an important part in safeguarding users.
In this environment, the online vernacular used in threats or describing acts of self-harm evolves quickly. Keeping pace with those changes can mean the difference between successfully intervening with an at-risk individual or being unable to reach them in time.
The same principle – contending with large amounts of conversational data whose value rapidly diminishes – is also at play in commercial applications, such as customer service operations.
Companies typically see a high degree of fluidity in the language used by their customers in the way they talk about emerging problems, as well as potential opportunities, such as requesting new products or services.
In each case, Pienso users are able to regularly re-train and fine tune their models to accommodate that changing data, and use fast inference to extract insights in real-time.
Empowering non-technical users
Pienso and Graphcore’s joint solution is tailored around the way that companies really work.
We understand that a data-driven strategy works best when it is guided by the same people who are most familiar with the data.
Being a low-code, no-code solution, Pienso allows chief customer officers and their teams, heads of business units, and other business domain experts with a high volume of text data but without technical expertise, to design and operate their own NLP insights programme.
Putting decision makers directly in control of the analytical tools enhances responsiveness, while freeing up employees with highly technical skills – such as AI engineers – for other activities.
Pienso + Graphcore availability
Pienso + Graphcore is available today in the cloud in North America and will be coming to Europe in September 2022. To book a demo or to find out more about special pricing for evaluation and pilot of the Pienso + Graphcore solution, visit graphcore.ai/pienso.
