Microsoft revealed this week that it has built a supercomputer, which is among the five most powerful in the world, according to the company, which will be used for research in artificial intelligence (AI) in collaboration with the OpenAI laboratory.
The announcement was made at Microsoft’s international development conference entitled Build 2020, which was held virtually Tuesday.
It follows the announcement last summer of a $ 1 billion investment by Microsoft in a partnership with OpenAI.
The computer giant has provided few details on the supercomputer, the cost of which is unknown. What we announce: it has 285,000 processor cores (computers on the market at the moment generally have 4 to 10), 10,000 graphics processors and has a network capacity of 400 gigabits per second per server.
The computer is connected to Microsoft’s cloud service, Azure, and will be dedicated only to research conducted by OpenAI, the artificial intelligence laboratory founded in 2015 by Elon Musk, among others. The latter has since left the organization’s board of directors.
The quest for strong artificial intelligence
OpenAI works to create artificial intelligence models capable of accomplishing complex tasks where the human being is, for the moment, more skillful and efficient: solving puzzles or learning and understanding languages, by example. This concept is called strong artificial intelligence ( artificial general intelligence, in English).
The exciting thing about these models is the wide range of possibilities they allow
, said Microsoft technical director Kevin Scott in a blog post(New window).
The goal is to be able to do a hundred exciting things in the field of natural language processing, and at the same time, do a hundred exciting things in the field of computer vision [artificial vision].
When we start to see combinations between these two fields, we will be able to discover new applications [to artificial intelligence], which are even difficult to imagine at the moment.