OpenAI’s supercomputer collaboration with Microsoft marks its biggest bet yet on AGI

摘要： Roughly a year ago, Microsoft announced it would invest $1 billion in OpenAI to jointly develop new technologies for Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and to “further extend” large-scale AI capabilities that “deliver on the promise” of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Roughly a year ago, Microsoft announced it would invest $1 billion in OpenAI to jointly develop new technologies for Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and to “further extend” large-scale AI capabilities that “deliver on the promise” of artificial general intelligence (AGI). In exchange, OpenAI agreed to license some of its intellectual property to Microsoft, which the company would then commercialize and sell to partners, and to train and run AI models on Azure as OpenAI worked to develop next-generation computing hardware.

Today during Microsoft’s Build 2020 developer conference, the first fruit of the partnership was revealed, in the form of a new supercomputer that Microsoft says was built in collaboration with — and exclusively for — OpenAI on Azure. Microsoft claims it’s the fifth most powerful machine in the world, compared with the TOP 500, a project that benchmarks and details the 500 top-performing supercomputers. According to the most recent rankings, it slots behind the China National Supercomputer Center’s Tianhe-2A and ahead of the Texas Advanced Computer Center’s Frontera, meaning it can perform somewhere between 38.7 and 100.7 quadrillion floating point operations per second (i.e., petaflops) at peak.

OpenAI has long asserted that immense computational horsepower is a necessary step on the road to AGI, or AI that can learn any task a human can. While luminaries like Mila founder Yoshua Bengio and Facebook VP and chief AI scientist Yann LeCun argue that AGI can’t exist, OpenAI’s cofounders and backers — among them Greg Brockman, chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and former Y Combinator president Sam Altman — believe powerful computers in conjunction with reinforcement learning and other techniques can achieve paradigm-shifting AI advances. The unveiling of the supercomputer represents OpenAI’s biggest bet yet on that vision.

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見全文： venturebeat

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