Monday, February 06, 2023

Big Tech And AI

Big Tech companies use cloud computing arms to pursue alliances with AI groups Deals between Google, Microsoft and Amazon and ‘generative AI’ start-ups raise competition concerns ...... Google’s recent $300mn bet on San Francisco-based Anthropic is the latest in a string of cloud-related partnerships struck between nascent AI groups and the world’s biggest technology companies. ......... The technology behind products including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a chatbot that can converse with users through text, requires enormous amounts of computing power — expensive infrastructure controlled by the same handful of tech giants......... AI start-ups that need to train models have little choice but to rush into the arms of large companies offering essential cloud computing at discounted rates and access to the large amounts of capital they need........ After the Financial Times first reported the Google-Anthropic investment gave the search giant a 10 per cent stake in the company, the two companies announced a separate cloud partnership. ....... The arrangement echoes the $1bn cash-for-computing investment that Microsoft made in OpenAI three years ago. In January, Microsoft announced a further “multiyear, multibillion-dollar” investment in OpenAI estimated at $10bn. ........ The deal cemented Microsoft’s position as exclusive infrastructure provider to one of the world’s leading AI start-ups. Chief executive Satya Nadella claimed that Microsoft had built a supercomputer to handle the OpenAI work, and that it could now handle some AI calculations at half the cost of its rivals. Reducing cost is key for the compute-intensive development of large language models: estimates put the cost of running ChatGPT, assuming 10mn monthly users, at $1mn per day.......

Amazon’s Trainium chips, custom-designed processors that rival Google’s Tensor Processing Unit.





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