# forck.live — 18–24 January 2021

> AI lab announcements, news reports and podcasts.

forck.live follows what companies announce about their own products. Press may
corroborate an official story; it never leads and never appears as an item of its
own. A missing date stays missing. A title is the publisher's words — where a
company does not publish in English, an English rendering is listed separately
as `Title in English` and named as this site's translation, never as theirs.

This file is one issue of the weekly archive: every confirmed
first-party announcement of ISO week 2021-W03, 18–24 January 2021, newest
first. The window never moves, so this URL always names the same seven days —
but a post published inside them and detected later is added when it arrives,
so a closed week can still gain entries.

Every entry is one first-party announcement, and carries the same eight fields
in this order before any others:

    Company · Announced · Category · Coverage · Announcement · Group · Source · Record

`Source` is the company's own page the announcement was traced to and `Record`
is this site's page for it. Both are safe to cite.

`Coverage` is a number of outlets, or `not counted` — which means this record
reached no count of its own, never that nobody wrote about it.

`Category` is this tracker's own analysis, and is authoritative wherever it is
stated. `not stated` means either that nothing has analysed the post yet or
that the analysis placed it outside this taxonomy; neither is a verdict about
the announcement.

`Announcement` is whether the post is news of something the company did, rather
than a how-to, a customer story, a changelog listing or a staffing note.

`Group` is which of this record's groups the entry falls in, carried on the
entry itself so it holds where the groups are headings and where they are not.
One of: `models`, `covered`, `announcements`, `routine`.

Anything after `Record` is held detail that only some announcements carry.

- This week's page: https://forck.live/week/2021-W03
- The current issue, and the catalogue of the other weeks: https://forck.live/briefing.md
- Catalogue: https://forck.live/llms.txt

## Announcements

### Hugging Face — Fit More and Train Faster With ZeRO via DeepSpeed and FairScale

- Company: Hugging Face (huggingface.co)
- Announced: 2021-01-19
- Category: capability-change
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: yes
- Group: announcements
- Source: https://huggingface.co/blog/zero-deepspeed-fairscale
- Record: https://forck.live/items/2271-fit-more-and-train-faster-with-zero-via-deepspeed-and-fairscale
- Subject: Platform

Hugging Face Trainer now supports DeepSpeed and FairScale ZeRO features for training large models faster and with more memory efficiency.

### Hugging Face — How we sped up transformer inference 100x for 🤗 API customers

- Company: Hugging Face (huggingface.co)
- Announced: 2021-01-18
- Category: capability-change
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: yes
- Group: announcements
- Source: https://huggingface.co/blog/accelerated-inference
- Record: https://forck.live/items/2272-how-we-sped-up-transformer-inference-100x-for-api-customers
- Subject: Platform

Hugging Face announced that they have achieved a 100x speedup in transformer inference for their Accelerated Inference API customers through a combination of high-level optimizations using Hugging Face libraries and low-level hardware-specific compilation techniques.