Microsoft has been secretly developing its own artificial intelligence (AI) chips to cope with rising development costs from internal projects and OpenAI, according to a report by The Information.
Microsoft’s hardware company, which it has been working for since 2019, appears to be designed to reduce the Redmond company’s reliance on Nvidia GPUs.
SCOOP: Microsoft has been developing an AI chip in-house since 2019, codenamed Athena.
Msft hopes the chip will help it control the cost of powering large-language models, the one behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
w/ @waynema https://t.co/m88oS1KSt7 @theinformation
— Anissa Gardizy (@anissagardizy8) April 18, 2023
SCOOP: Microsoft has been developing an AI chip internally since 2019, codenamed Athena.
Microsoft hopes the chip will help it control the cost of powering large language models, the ones behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
A Google search reveals that the Nvidia H100, one of the most popular GPUs for training machine learning systems, costs as much as $40,000 on resale services like eBay, amid growing shortages in the market.
These high costs have pushed several big tech companies to develop their own hardware: Meta, Google and Amazon have all developed machine learning chips in recent years.
Details remain scant, as Microsoft has yet to comment officially, but The Information’s report claims the chips are being developed under the codename “Athena,” perhaps a nod to the Greek goddess of war, as that the generative AI arms race continues to intensify.
The report also mentions that the new chips are already being tested by members of Microsoft’s internal machine learning team and OpenAI developers.
While we can only speculate at the moment as to how OpenAI intends to use Microsoft’s AI chips, the company’s co-founder and CEO, Sam Altman, recently testified to a crowd at MIT that the infrastructure and design that led the company from GPT-1 to GPT-4 are “out of stock” and will need to be rethought:
“I think we’re at the end of the era where these are going to be these, like, giant, giant models. We will improve them in other ways.”
Amazon has just entered the scene as a (sort of) new entrant with its first self-developed models as part of its Bedrock AI infrastructure rollout.
And, on April 17, the world’s richest person and tech mogul, Elon Musk, announced the imminent release of TruthGPT, an alleged “truth seeker” big language model designed to take on the alleged left-wing bias of ChatGPT, during an interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.
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