Graphcore Innovation & Technology Culture

What new technologies or frameworks are helping your teams move faster and build smarter?

Hardware development is still largely a sequential — or waterfall-oriented — process. Physical builds, component lead times, testing and validation create dependencies that cannot easily be accelerated. However, AI is helping us streamline knowledge work surrounding that process, for example to develop first drafts of specifications, summarize technical discussions, prepare program updates and tailor complex information for different audiences. 

They do not replace technical review or engineering judgment, but they significantly reduce the time spent starting documents, synthesizing information and handling routine communication. The result is more time for the work where engineers create the most value — collaborating across disciplines, resolving complex problems, evaluating tradeoffs and applying sound engineering judgment.

How do you balance experimentation with reliability in your development process?

Balancing experimentation with reliability is always challenging, particularly when there is pressure to move quickly. We approach it through risk-based decision-making: using the team’s collective experience and engineering judgment to identify where experimentation is appropriate and where the consequences of failure require greater rigor.

Early prototypes and controlled experiments allow us to test assumptions and learn before committing to a design. At the same time, clearly defining the minimum viable product helps distinguish the capabilities that are essential from those where we can retain flexibility. Safety, core functionality, regulatory requirements and critical performance remain non-negotiable, while lower-risk features can evolve through iteration.

Ultimately, a minimum viable product should represent minimum viable scope — not minimum acceptable reliability. By concentrating testing and validation on the highest-risk areas, we can move quickly where the cost of failure is low and proceed more deliberately where reliability matters most.

What role does collaboration play in turning innovative ideas into products? 

Collaboration is what turns an innovative idea into a product that can actually be built, tested and delivered. No single person or team sees every aspect of a complex engineering problem, so bringing together different disciplines, experiences and perspectives is essential.

One example is how our current development efforts bring together Graphcore teams in the United Kingdom, Poland, India and the United States. A challenge that may initially appear to belong to one discipline often has implications across hardware, software, validation and system integration. By involving specialists from these areas early, sharing findings openly and iterating on solutions together, we identify risks and improve decisions faster than any one team could independently.

That global collaboration is about more than distributing work. It allows each team to contribute its particular strengths while maintaining shared ownership of the outcome. Bringing together people across geographies, backgrounds and areas of expertise is ultimately what enables promising ideas to become great products.