Microsoft has secretly been growing its personal synthetic intelligence (AI) chips to take care of the rising prices of growth for in-house and OpenAI initiatives, per a report from The Info.
Reportedly within the works since 2019, Microsoft’s lately revealed {hardware} enterprise seems to be designed to scale back the Redmond firm’s reliance on Nvidia’s GPUs.
SCOOP: Microsoft has been growing an AI chip in-house since 2019, codenamed Athena.
Msft hopes the chip will assist it management the price of powering large-language fashions, the one behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
w/ @waynema https://t.co/m88oS1KSt7 @theinformation
— Anissa Gardizy (@anissagardizy8) April 18, 2023
A Google search reveals that the Nvidia H100, one of many extra fashionable GPUs for coaching machine studying techniques, prices as a lot as $40,000 on reseller service comparable to eBay amid growing market shortage.
These excessive prices have pushed a number of large tech corporations to develop their {hardware}, with Meta, Google, and Amazon all growing machine-learning chips over the previous few years.
Particulars stay scarce as Microsoft hasn’t formally commented but, however The Info’s report claims that the chips are being developed beneath the codename “Athena” — maybe a nod to the Greek goddess of struggle, because the generative AI arms race continues to warmth up.
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The report additionally mentions that the information chips are already being examined by staff members from Microsoft’s inside machine studying employees and OpenAI’s builders.
Whereas we will solely speculate right now as to how OpenAI intends to make use of Microsoft’s AI chips, the corporate’s co-founder and CEO, Sam Altman, lately advised a crowd at MIT that the infrastructure and design that acquired the corporate from GPT-1 to GPT-4 is “performed out” and can should be rethought:
“I believe we’re on the finish of the period the place it should be these, like, large, large fashions. We’ll make them higher in different methods.”
This comes on the heels of a busy information cycle for the AI sector, with Amazon lately coming into the sector as a (considerably) new challenger with its first self-developed fashions leaping onto the scene as a part of its Bedrock AI infrastructure rollout.
And, on April 17, tech mogul and world’s richest particular person Elon Musk introduced the approaching launch of TruthGPT, a supposed “truth-seeking” massive language mannequin designed to tackle ChatGPT’s alleged left-wing bias, throughout an interview with Fox Information’ Tucker Carlson.
