A little over a year ago, Elon Musk advocated stopping the training of artificial intelligence due to the potential risks that it may present. Despite having expressed himself in this regard on several occasions, the tycoon, who was already involved in the beginnings of OpenAIjoined the AI race that same year by creating xAI. This AI company is responsible for Grokthe chatbot available to paying X subscribers.
Now the tycoon has announced a new step forward to compete with OpenAI, Google and other participants in this race with the opening of a new supercomputing cluster in Memphis, Tennessee. According to Musk’s statement on X, formerly Twitter, ‘the most powerful AI training cluster in the world’.
This is a significant advantage in training the world’s most powerful AI by every metric by December this year
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 22, 2024
The xAI team started up the computing center early Monday morning. This ‘Memphis Supercluster’ has with 100,000 liquid-cooled H100 GPUs interconnected by an RDMA meshThis latest technology allows one computer to access another’s data without intervention from the operating system or CPU, providing high bandwidth and low latency.
The H100s, on the other hand, are Nvidia’s AI computing-designed graphics cards that have made it, at times, in the company with the largest market capitalization in the world in recent months. Each H100 costs around 30,000 euros and is the most sought-after hardware by companies like Microsoft and Google for their own artificial intelligence models.
This setup, according to Musk, gives xAI ‘a significant advantage for train the world’s most powerful AI by all metrics by December of this year‘. The owner of X, Tesla and SpaceX is likely referring to the third generation of the language model behind Grok, Grok3.
The investment is large, Only 3 billion euros in graphics cards according to the market price of the H100. Although xAI has not provided figures, local News Channel 3 WREG Memphis calls it the largest capital investment by a startup in Memphis history. In just five months, we will be able to see the result and whether Musk’s promises of ‘the most powerful AI in the world’ are fulfilled.