Elon Musk reportedly purchases 1000’s of GPUs for generative AI undertaking at Twitter

Regardless of lately calling for a six-month pause within the improvement of highly effective AI fashions, Twitter CEO Elon Musk lately bought roughly 10,000 GPUs for a generative AI undertaking inside Twitter, experiences Enterprise Insider, citing folks acquainted with the corporate. The precise nature of the undertaking, nevertheless, continues to be a thriller.

GPUs, or graphics processing models, are purpose-built chips initially designed for laptop graphics, however their massively parallel designs make them superb for doing generative AI processing as effectively. Coaching (creating) a brand new AI mannequin often requires a considerable amount of computing energy, together with many GPUs, which implies that Musk’s acquisition may characterize a big dedication towards creating a deep-learning AI mannequin inside Twitter.

In late February, The Info broke information that Musk had approached AI researchers to type a brand new AI lab to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, together with former DeepMind researchers Igor Babuschkin and Manuel Kroiss. Earlier, Musk had publicly complained about bias in OpenAI’s merchandise, saying they have been too “woke.” Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 however left the corporate after an inner disagreement in 2018.

As for the Twitter-based AI undertaking, Enterprise Insider experiences that it is a big language mannequin (LLM), the kind of generative AI tech that powers ChatGPT. The agency may doubtlessly make the most of its huge library of person tweets to assist prepare the mannequin for pure language output.

Musk’s funding in GPUs for this undertaking is estimated to be within the tens of tens of millions of {dollars}. The GPU models will doubtless be housed in Twitter’s Atlanta knowledge heart, one in every of two operated by the corporate, in accordance with Enterprise Insider’s supply.

Attainable purposes of generative AI inside Twitter may embrace enhancing Twitter search or creating novel promoting strategies. Moreover, the {hardware} buy may characterize public posturing—Enterprise Insider quotes somebody acquainted with the undertaking as saying that the acquisition of the GPUs exhibits that Musk is “dedicated” to AI improvement throughout the firm.

In late March, Musk was a signatory on a extensively publicized open letter drafted by the Way forward for Life Institute (a company partially funded by Musk) that known as for a six-month moratorium on the event of AI fashions extra highly effective than GPT-4, which is presently OpenAI’s strongest launched language mannequin. The researchers cited potential dangers to human civilization from runaway AI.

Whereas the pause idea proved infeasible, not lengthy after, some critics claimed that Musk needed a “pause” so his corporations may meet up with OpenAI. Whereas there is not any announcement of whether or not Twitter’s AI mannequin shall be “extra highly effective” than GPT-4, these newest strikes could also be seen as undermining Musk’s requires warning on the topic.