In collaboration with OpenAI, Microsoft has built a supermassive computer to train huge Artificial Intelligence (AI) models. The announcement was made at Build conference for developers stating that it is one of the top five publicly disclosed supercomputers.
It is a result of a partnership that was signed last year to create new supercomputing technologies in Azure jointly. It is the first major step toward building the next generation of huge AI models. The machine has 285,000 processor cores supported by 10,000 graphics chips for OpenAI, a company that wants to ensure that AI technology helps humans.
Kevin Scott, Microsoft Chief Technical Officer, is of the view, “The exciting thing about these models is the breadth of things they’re going to enable,” his further thought meant to express that the potential benefits extend far beyond narrow advances in one type of AI model.
“This is about being able to do a hundred exciting things in natural language processing at once and a hundred exciting things in computer vision, and when you start to see combinations of these perceptual domains, you’re going to have new applications that are hard to even imagine right now,” he said.
The two brands aim to create multitasking large-scale AI models that can be easily made available for developers as well as for the public to use. Both the companies ultimately aim at building their large AI models, training optimization tools, and supercomputing resources available via Azure AI services and GitHub for researchers.
“By now, most people intuitively understand how personal computers are a platform — you buy one, and it’s not like everything the computer is ever going to do is built into the device when you pull it out of the box,” Scott said.
“That’s exactly what we mean when we say AI is becoming a platform,” he said. “This is about taking a very broad set of data and training a model that learns to do a general set of things and making that model available for millions of developers to go figure out how to do interesting and creative things with.”
Earlier this year, the tech giant released a blueprint for the production of 17 billion natural language parameters. For this supercomputer and its AI at system size, Microsoft plans to build and open source more such popular versions.
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