Today Palo-Alto-based SambaNova Systems unveiled a new AI chip, the SN40L, which will power its full-stack large language model (LLM) platform, the SambaNova Suite, that helps enterprises go from chip to model — building and deploying customized generative AI models.

Rodrigo Liang, cofounder and CEO of SambaNova Systems, told VentureBeat that SambaNova goes farther than Nvidia does up the stack — helping enterprises actually train their models properly.

“Many people were enthusiastic about the infrastructure that we have, but the problem they were running into is they didn’t have the expertise, so they would hand off to other companies like OpenAI to build the model,” he explained.

A ‘Linux’ moment for AI

As a result, SambaNova decided that it believed this is a “Linux” moment for AI — that open source AI models would be the big winners — so in addition to pre-trained foundation models, its SambaNova Suite, offers a curated collection of open-source generative AI models optimized for the enterprise, deployed on-premises or in the cloud.