Microsoft has unveiled a brand new chip that’s supposed to be used in artificial intelligence (AI) functions in a information publish revealed on Nov. 15.
The corporate mentioned that it unveiled the chip, named the Azure Maia 100 AI Accelerator, at its Microsoft Ignite convention on the identical day. It mentioned that the Maia 100 chip is optimized to be used in artificial intelligence functions, together with generative AI.
Microsoft’s weblog publish additionally quoted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who mentioned that his firm — finest identified for ChatGPT — contributed to the chip’s design. Altman mentioned:
“Since first partnering with Microsoft, we’ve collaborated to co-design Azure’s AI infrastructure at each layer … We have been excited when Microsoft first shared their designs for the Maia chip, and we’ve labored collectively to refine and take a look at it with our fashions.”
Altman added that Azure’s structure is “now optimized all the way down to the silicon with Maia.” He mentioned that this enchancment will result in extra succesful AI fashions and extra inexpensive entry. OpenAI has by the way paused paid subscriptions as a consequence of excessive demand.
In a separate interview with CNBC, Microsoft Company Vice President for Azure {Hardware} Techniques Rani Borkar said that Microsoft is at the moment testing how the Maia 100 works with its Bing AI chatbot and its GitHub Copilot coding assistant. Additionally it is testing the chip’s means to energy OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo giant language mannequin (LLM).
Microsoft concurrently introduced the Azure Cobalt CPU Cobalt 100 Arm chip, which is meant for general-purpose computing on the cloud. The corporate mentioned that each chips might be launched in early 2024 inside its personal knowledge facilities.
AI race
Aside from Microsoft, a number of different business heavyweights are additionally making strides in AI chip improvement. Nvidia at the moment leads the way in which with its H100 Tensor Core GPU chips, that are broadly used all through the AI business.
Actually, Microsoft mentioned in at the moment’s weblog publish that it’s rising its business partnerships in an effort to present prospects with entry to Nvidia’s H100 chips and its upcoming H200 chips. CNBC, in the meantime, instructed that Maia will compete with the H100 chip.
A scarcity of Nvidia’s chips available in the market presents a big alternative for different tech companies to bolster their chip manufacturing. Stories in October mentioned that OpenAI might start producing chips in-house. Meta introduced particulars of its subsequent technology of AI chips in May. Google in August introduced a chip known as Cloud TPUv5e to be used in AI.
Discussion about this post