One company that is the toast of tech town — because of AI mainly — is Nvidia. The US-based tech company’s processors are integral for training and running large language models, which are the bedrock of generative AI like ChatGPT, Google Bard among others. Nvidia has seen its stock rise significantly as well as its market valuation.
In a recent interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times’ DealBook conference, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recounted how a conversation with Elon Musk led to the creation of the world’s first AI supercomputer.Huang said that he was speaking at a conference when Musk approached him and said, “I need one of those.”
Huang and his team at Nvidia set to work on the project, and after a few years, they were able to deliver the world’s first AI supercomputer to OpenAI, a non-profit research company co-founded by Musk. He said that at first the company built the supercomputer for its engineers to test. This was back in 2012 and the computer was finally delivered in 2018.
The supercomputer, called DGX, is capable of performing 2 petaflops of calculations per second. This made it one of the most powerful computers in the world, and Huang said that the company sells it for $250,000.
A ‘history’ with OpenAI
Musk was back then involved with OpenAI and is among the founders of the non-profit. However, Musk later moved away from Open AI and now Microsoft is one of its biggest partners. Musk has made a number of public statements about his reasons for leaving OpenAI. In a 2018 tweet, he said that he had left the company because he “disagreed with the way the company was being run.” He has also said that he believes that AI is a “fundamental risk to the future of humanity” and that we need to be “careful” about how we develop it.
In a recent interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times’ DealBook conference, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recounted how a conversation with Elon Musk led to the creation of the world’s first AI supercomputer.Huang said that he was speaking at a conference when Musk approached him and said, “I need one of those.”
Huang and his team at Nvidia set to work on the project, and after a few years, they were able to deliver the world’s first AI supercomputer to OpenAI, a non-profit research company co-founded by Musk. He said that at first the company built the supercomputer for its engineers to test. This was back in 2012 and the computer was finally delivered in 2018.
The supercomputer, called DGX, is capable of performing 2 petaflops of calculations per second. This made it one of the most powerful computers in the world, and Huang said that the company sells it for $250,000.
A ‘history’ with OpenAI
Musk was back then involved with OpenAI and is among the founders of the non-profit. However, Musk later moved away from Open AI and now Microsoft is one of its biggest partners. Musk has made a number of public statements about his reasons for leaving OpenAI. In a 2018 tweet, he said that he had left the company because he “disagreed with the way the company was being run.” He has also said that he believes that AI is a “fundamental risk to the future of humanity” and that we need to be “careful” about how we develop it.
