Microsoft Acquires Twice as Many Nvidia AI Chips as Tech Rivals (ft.com) 6
Microsoft bought twice as many of Nvidia's flagship chips as any of its largest rivals in the US and China this year, as OpenAI's biggest investor accelerated its investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure. From a report: Analysts at Omdia, a technology consultancy, estimate that Microsoft bought 485,000 of Nvidia's "Hopper" chips this year. That put Microsoft far ahead of Nvidia's next biggest US customer Meta, which bought 224,000 Hopper chips, as well as its cloud computing rivals Amazon and Google.
With demand outstripping supply of Nvidia's most advanced graphics processing units for much of the past two years, Microsoft's chip hoard has given it an edge in the race to build the next generation of AI systems. This year, Big Tech companies have spent tens of billions of dollars on data centres running Nvidia's latest chips, which have become the hottest commodity in Silicon Valley since the debut of ChatGPT two years ago kick-started an unprecedented surge of investment in AI.
With demand outstripping supply of Nvidia's most advanced graphics processing units for much of the past two years, Microsoft's chip hoard has given it an edge in the race to build the next generation of AI systems. This year, Big Tech companies have spent tens of billions of dollars on data centres running Nvidia's latest chips, which have become the hottest commodity in Silicon Valley since the debut of ChatGPT two years ago kick-started an unprecedented surge of investment in AI.
Doing anything useful? (Score:3)
If we're not already at the point of diminishing returns for the current approach, we'll be there soon. Though I will admit the generative AI programs that let anyone shitpost on Twitter and not just people with rudimentary Photoshop skills are certainly nice. Perhaps not worth the tens of billions of dollars of investment, but appreciated all the same.
Re: (Score:2)
You should give em a shot.
If you've got a GPU that can do it- LLaVa 1.6 32B 8b and Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B FP32 are available on hugging face. With a little prompt engineering, you can get them to write code to draw a picture you give it in any language you can imagine. My boss rendered in pure HTML is pretty amusing and impressive.
As for the flubbing of questions- I think that's probably a misuse of the technology, really. Don't ask these things for f
Re: (Score:2)
With a little prompt engineering, you can get them to write code to draw a picture you give it in any language you can imagine.
There's a market for this? No wonder I never understood AI.
I hope they choke on them (Score:2)
when the AI bubble finally bursts.
Won't miss the boat this time! (Score:2)
You have to understand where MS is coming from.
They completely underestimated the impact of the internet on PCs. It was a nothing but a curiosity to them at the time, and they discounted it for years, putting them behind.
With AI, they don't want that to happen again. At almost any cost.
Of course, there is a huge chance that it's all hype. If so, they are pretty well screwed.
'World War 3.0' is a good book about that period.