Elon Musk reportedly purchases thousands of GPUs for generative AI project at Twitter

Regardless of lately calling for a six-month pause within the growth of highly effective AI fashions, Twitter CEO Elon Musk lately bought roughly 10,000 GPUs for a generative AI venture inside Twitter, reviews Business Insider, citing individuals accustomed to the corporate. The precise nature of the venture, nevertheless, remains to be a thriller.

GPUs, or graphics processing items, are purpose-built chips initially designed for laptop graphics, however their massively parallel designs make them perfect for doing generative AI processing as nicely. 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 might signify a big dedication towards growing a deep-learning AI mannequin inside Twitter.

In late February, The Data broke news that Musk had approached AI researchers to kind 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 had been too “woke.” Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 however left the company after an inner disagreement in 2018.

As for the Twitter-based AI venture, Enterprise Insider reviews that it is a big language mannequin (LLM), the kind of generative AI tech that powers ChatGPT. The agency might probably make the most of its large library of consumer tweets to assist practice the mannequin for pure language output.

Musk’s funding in GPUs for this venture is estimated to be within the tens of tens of millions of {dollars}. The GPU items will possible be housed in Twitter’s Atlanta information middle, certainly one of two operated by the corporate, based on Enterprise Insider’s supply.

Potential functions of generative AI inside Twitter might embody bettering Twitter search or creating novel promoting strategies. Moreover, the {hardware} buy might signify public posturing—Enterprise Insider quotes somebody accustomed to the venture as saying that the acquisition of the GPUs reveals that Musk is “dedicated” to AI growth inside the firm.

In late March, Musk was a signatory on a widely publicized open letter drafted by the Way forward for Life Institute (a corporation partially funded by Musk) that referred to as for a six-month moratorium on the event of AI fashions extra highly effective than GPT-4, which is at present 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 wished a “pause” so his corporations might meet up with OpenAI. Whereas there isn’t any announcement of whether or not Twitter’s AI mannequin can be “extra highly effective” than GPT-4, these newest strikes could also be seen as undermining Musk’s requires warning on the topic.