United States: The tech giant Microsoft has launched its first Artificial Intelligence chip ‘Maia’ at the company’s annual Ignite conference in Seattle.
The Maia chip was designed to run large language models, a type of AI software that underpins Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service and is a product of Microsoft’s collaboration with ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
Microsoft and other tech giants such as Alphabet are challenged with the high cost of delivering AI services, which can be ten times greater than for traditional services such as search engines.
Microsoft executives have stated that they plan to tackle those costs by routing nearly all of the company’s sprawling efforts to put AI in its products through a common set of foundational AI models. They said that the Maia chip had been optimized for that kind of work.
Mr. Scott Guthrie, the Executive Vice President of Microsoft’s Cloud and AI group, remarked that, “We think this gives us a way that we can provide better solutions to our customers that are faster and lower cost and higher quality.”
Microsoft also pointed out that next year it will offer its Azure customers cloud services that run on the newest flagship chips from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices. The company announced that it is testing GPT 4, OpenAI’s most advanced model, on AMD’s chips.
Mr. Ben Bajarin, Chief Executive of analyst firm Creative Strategies, commented that, “This is not something that’s displacing Nvidia. Microsoft has a very different kind of core opportunity here because they’re making a lot of money per user for the services.”
KNOWLEDGE | Eating ultraprocessed foods increases risk of multimorbidity; Study
