Billionaire tech tycoon Elon Musk told investors he plans to build a supercomputer dubbed a “gigafactory of compute” to support the development of artificial intelligence startup xAI, a news agency reported on Saturday.
Musk wants the supercomputer — which will combine 100,000 Nvidia chips — to be up and running by the fall of 2025 and “will hold himself personally responsible for on-time delivery,” The Information reported.
The planned supercomputer will be “at least four times the size of the largest GPU clusters that exist today,” like the ones Meta uses to train its AI models, Musk said during a presentation to investors this month.
Ever since OpenAi’s ChatGPT AI builder exploded onto the scene in 2022, the technology has been an area of fierce competition between tech giants Microsoft and Google, as well as Meta and startups like Anthropic and Stability AI.
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Musk is one of the few investors in the world with deep enough pockets to compete with OpenAI, Google or Meta in AI.
xAI is developing a chatbot called Grok that can access social media platform X, formerly Twitter also owned by Musk, in real time.
Musk founded OpenAI in 2015 but left in 2018, later saying he was uncomfortable with the company’s for-profit direction under CEO Sam Altman.
He filed a lawsuit against the company in March, accusing it of violating its original nonprofit mission to make AI research available to everyone.
OpenAI argues that Musk’s lawsuit, as well as his embrace of open source development, is little more than a case of sour grapes after he left the company.
Source: AFP