Last year, Microsoft announced a billion-dollar investment in OpenAI, an organization whose mission is to create artificial general intelligence and make it safe for humanity.
A year on, we have the first results of that partnership. At this year’s Microsoft Build 2020, a developer conference showcasing Microsoft’s latest and greatest, the company said they’d completed a supercomputer exclusively for OpenAI’s machine learning research. But this is no run-of-the-mill supercomputer. It’s a beast of a machine. The company said it has 285,000 CPU cores, 10,000 GPUs, and 400 gigabits per second of network connectivity for each GPU server.
To be clear, this isn’t AGI, and there’s no certain path to AGI yet. But algorithms beginning to modestly generalize within domains is progress.
“We’re testing a hypothesis that has been there since the beginning of the field: that a neural network close to the size of the human brain can be trained to be an AGI,” Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s co-founder, chairman, and CTO, told the Financial Times when Microsoft’s investment was first made public. “If the hypothesis is true, the upside for humanity will be remarkable.”
See the full story here: https://singularityhub.com/2020/05/31/microsoft-just-built-a-world-class-supercomputer-exclusively-for-openai/