What is Nvidia doing?
The main announcement of the company's annual developer conference on Monday was the "Blackwell" series of AI chips, used to power the fantastically expensive data centers that train frontier AI models such as the latest generations of GPT, Claude and Gemini. One, the Blackwell B200, is a fairly straightforward upgrade over the company's pre-existing H100 AI chip. Training a massive AI model, the size of GPT-4, would currently take about 8,000 H100 chips, and 15 megawatts of power, Nvidia said enough to power about 30,000 typical British homes.
With the company's new chips, the same training run would take just 2,000 B200s and 4MW of power. That could lead to a reduction in electricity use by the AI industry, or it could lead to the same electricity being used to power much larger AI models.
What makes a chip 'super'?
This story is from the March 21, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
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This story is from the March 21, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
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