Facebook hires Shahriar Rabii, chief of Google's chip development, to lead his own efforts

Facebook, with the goal of continuing its development of AI-based chips, hired one of Google's chip developers, Shahriar Rabii. Previously senior director of engineering at Google, Rabii assumed the role of vice president and director of Silicon at Facebook, after nearly seven years at Google. Earlier this year, it was said that Facebook was building a team to design its own semiconductors, adding to a trend among tech companies to source and reduce their reliance on chip makers such as Intel and Qualcomm. . The company based in Menlo Park, Calif., Plans to join other tech giants attacking the massive effort to develop chips. In 2010, Apple began shipping its own chips and now uses them on many of its major product lines. Alphabet & # 39; s Google is also developing its own artificial intelligence chip.

As reported for the first time by Bloomberg, Shahriar Rabii was hired by Facebook to be the vice president and chief of silicon. On Facebook, Rabii is said to be working under Andrew Bosworth, the head of the AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality) business, the report adds. Facebook and Google declined to comment on the reported change, added Bloomberg. According to his LinkedIn profile, which shows his new position on Facebook, Rabii joined Google in December 2011 as director of engineering, where he "launched several silicon development programs". His bio profile indicates that Rabii founded a Consumer Silicon team known as "gChips" within Google and later the hardware engineering team's hardware team. Later in 2014, Rabii was promoted to Director of Engineering where he directed and developed silicon engineering, product / program management, production and technology engineering.

Products including phones, laptops, Google Home, Nest, AR / VR, accessories and basic technologies included imagery, displays, wireless systems, sensors, digital cameras audio, power systems, batteries. He has released several products for mass production, including Pixel Visual Core for ML and computational photography, the Titan family of secure elements, video transcoders VP9 and AV1 and others.

As part of its efforts to increase its presence in the hardware market could use AI chips to power hardware devices such as smart speakers and virtual reality headsets (such as its Oculus Go and Oculus headsets). Rift), with the exception of artificial intelligence software and servers in its data centers. Future generations of its products could be enhanced by custom chipsets and by using its own processors, Facebook would have finer control over product development and would be able to better tailor its software and hardware together.

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