Hardware

Nvidia’s latest chip promises to boost AI’s speed and energy efficiency.

An upstart chip company dramatically accelerates pretrained large language models. Groq offers cloud access to Meta’s Llama 2 and Mistral.ai’s Mixtral at speeds an order of magnitude greater than other AI platforms. Registered users can try it.

Huawei is emerging as an important supplier of AI chips. Amid a U.S. ban on exports of advanced chips to China, demand for Huawei’s AI chips is so intense that the company is limiting production of the chip that powers one of its most popular smartphones so it can serve the AI market.

The AI boom is taxing power grids and pushing builders of data centers to rethink their sources of electricity.

ChatGPT is pitching in on the assembly line. Siemens and Microsoft launched a joint pilot program of a GPT-powered model for controlling manufacturing machinery. German automotive parts manufacturer Schaeffler is testing the system in its factories, as is Siemens itself. 

A new cloud-computing company promises to provide scarce AI processing power to startups and researchers. Voltage Park, a nonprofit north of Silicon Valley, will offer processing power from 24,000 top-of-the-line Nvidia H100 graphics processing units (GPUs)...

The state of California pulled the parking brake on Cruise driverless vehicles. The DMV suspended Cruise’s permit to operate vehicles in the state without safety drivers. The General Motors subsidiary responded by halting its robotaxi operations across the United States.

Nvidia’s top-of-the-line chips are in high demand and short supply. There aren’t enough H100 graphics processing units (GPUs) to meet the crush of demand brought on by the vogue for generative AI, VentureBeat reported.

TinyML shows promise for bringing deep learning to applications where electrical power is scarce, processing in the cloud is impractical, and/or data privacy is paramount.

Chinese companies have found loopholes to sidestep United States limits on AI chips. Facing severe limits on U.S. exports of high-performance chips, Chinese AI firms are purchasing them through subsidiaries and using them through cloud services, the Financial Times reported.

A new computing cluster delivers more bang per chip. Cerebras unveiled Andromeda, a supercomputer based on its processors. Unlike conventional clusters, the system’s processing speed rises linearly with additional processors.

Advanced AI requires advanced hardware. What if the global supply of high-end AI chips dries up? Most of the world’s advanced AI processors are manufactured in Taiwan, where tension with mainland China is rising.

Is your colossal text generator bogged down in training? Nvidia announced a chip designed to accelerate the transformer architecture, the basis of large language models such as GPT-3.

Facebook’s parent company is staking its future on a new compute cluster. Meta unveiled AI Research SuperCluster (RSC), which is designed to accelerate training of large models for applications like computer vision, natural language processing, and speech recognition.

The hardware that runs the latest AI systems faces rising uncertainty as models grow larger and more computationally intensive. The U.S. Commerce Department sounded an alarm over bottlenecks in the availability of semiconductor chips.