Elon Musk promises world's most powerful AI

News: OpenAI plans its own AI chip

Welcome back!

Today we’re diving deep into the infrastructure that powers AI. Companies around the world are exploring new ways to overcome the global shortage of Nvidia GPUs. Let’s go.        

In today’s Daily Update:

  • 🗞️ OpenAI plans to develop its own AI chip       

  • 🤖 Nvidia prepares new version of flagship AI chip for Chinese market         

  • 📸 Elon Musk promises world’s most powerful AI by December        

  • 🚨 AI Roundup: Four quick hits

Read time: 2 minutes

TOP STORY

🗞️ OpenAI plans to develop its own AI chip

Source: Global Corporate Venturing

OpenAI is reportedly in talks with chip designers such as Broadcom to develop its own AI chip. The company wants to reduce its reliance on expensive Nvidia GPUs that are experiencing a global shortage. 

The rundown:

  • OpenAI is currently hiring former Google employees who helped produce Google’s proprietary tensor processing unit (AI chip). 

  • Despite ongoing discussions with chip designers including Broadcom, the company isn’t expected to begin producing a new chip until 2026. 

  • OpenAI is exploring different chip packaging and memory components to optimize the performance of its new chips. 

  • CEO Sam Altman also plans to raise billions of dollars to launch a network of AI chip factories. 

Why it matters: The ongoing GPU shortage is slowing down development and increasing costs in the AI sector. While this is adversely affecting smaller startups, it also presents challenges to industry leaders like OpenAI. Reducing its dependence on Nvidia is key to OpenAI’s long-term pursuit of AGI. 

AI INSIGHT

🤖 Nvidia prepares new version of flagship AI chip for Chinese market

Source: Nvidia

Nvidia is working on a new version of its flagship AI chips for the Chinese market to comply with current U.S. export regulations. 

Key points:

  • The U.S. government tightened restrictions on the export of cutting-edge processors to China in 2023, citing concerns that supercomputing advancements could aid China’s military. 

  • Despite regulatory challenges, the Chinese market remains crucial for Nvidia, accounting for about 17% of its revenue last fiscal year. 

  • Nvidia recently announced its “Blackwell” chip series that will be mass-produced later this year. 

  • The company plans to launch an iteration of its Blackwell chip called “B20” to distribute in China in 2025. 

Both sides: This is a win for Nvidia and its shareholders. The same cannot be said for the U.S. government, which is actively trying to stunt China’s AI innovation and maintain global prowess in technology. 

BUSINESS SPOTLIGHT

📸 Elon Musk promises world’s most powerful AI by December

DALL-E 3

Elon Musk just announced that xAI has begun training its first model at the Gigafactory of Compute. The billionaire says his AI startup will deliver “the world’s most powerful AI by every metric” by the end of the year. 

The details:

  • The Gigafactory of Compute is the world’s largest GPU cluster for AI training, built on 100,000 Nvidia H100 chips. 

  • Musk says training began at the Memphis Supercluster around 4:20 a.m. local time yesterday. 

  • xAI initially planned to complete the Gigafactory of Compute by fall 2025.

  • After delaying Grok-2’s release to August, the company is now eyeing the launch of Grok-3 by the end of 2024.

Steaming ahead: The Gigafactory of Compute’s progress is way ahead of the timeline we initially expected. Musk has failed to deliver on some bold promises about AI to this point, but it seems like xAI’s Grok chatbot is finally positioned to rival industry-leading models. 

MORE TRENDING NEWS

🚨 AI Roundup: Four quick hits

DALL-E 3

  • Google develops highly accurate AI-enhanced weather simulator. 

  • Microsoft researchers introduce “Graph RAG” approach that helps language models better process external data. 

  • Japanese publishers warn that AI search engines could irreversibly damage democracy and culture. 

  • Cohere raises $500 million for its data privacy-focused enterprise AI platform. 

THAT’S A WRAP

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