According to a report from The Information, Microsoft has been secretly developing its own artificial intelligence (AI) chip in response to rising development costs both internally and through the OpenAI project.
Microsoft's recently revealed hardware venture appears to be aimed at reducing the Redmond, Washington company's reliance on Nvidia GPUs since 2019, according to reports. A Google search shows that the Nvidia H100, one of the more popular GPUs for training machine learning systems, fetches up to $40,000 on reseller services like eBay in an increasingly scarce market.
These high costs have prompted several large tech companies to develop their hardware, with Meta, Google and Amazon all developing machine learning chips over the past few years. Details are still scarce as Microsoft has yet to officially comment, but The Information reports that the chips are being developed under the codename "Athena" a possible nod to the Greek goddess of war as the generative AI arms race continues to heat up. Salute up.
The report also mentions that members of a team of Microsoft's in-house machine learning staff and OpenAI developers have already tested the new chip. While one can only speculate at this point about how OpenAI intends to use Microsoft's AI chips, the company's co-founder and CEO Sam Altman recently told a group at MIT that getting the company from GPT-1 to GPT-4 has been " end", needs to be rethought: "I think we're at the end of an era where these are, like, giant, giant models. We're going to make them better in other ways."
This comes on the heels of a busy news cycle in the AI space, with Amazon recently entering the space as a (sort of) new challenger with the launch of its first homegrown model as part of its Bedrock AI infrastructure Part of it jumped onto the stage.
And, on April 17, tech mogul and world’s richest man, Elon Musk, announced in an interview with Fox News’ Tucker the imminent launch of TruthGPT, a so-called “truth-seeking” large-scale language model designed to take on ChatGPT’s so-called The left-wing bias Carlson.
