Last year, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI with a goal to build supercomputers that leverages Azure’s cloud services. Now, that investment is showing its first results. In terms of specifications, the new supercomputer packs some impressive numbers. It a single system with more than 285,000 CPU cores, 10,000 GPUs, and 400 gigabits per second of network connectivity for each GPU server. Both companies said they want to build multitasking large-scale AI models to make them available for developers and the public to use. Microsoft said that the end goal is to make its large AI models, training optimization tools, and supercomputing resources available through Azure AI services and GitHub for researchers. Earlier this year, the tech giant unveiled a 17-billion parameter natural language generation model. With this supercomputer and its AI at scale program, Mircosoft aims to create more such generic models and open-source it.
