Elon Musk reportedly purchases thousands of GPUs for generative AI project at Twitter
Enlarge / An AI-generated image of "a cyborg Twitter bird logo composed of thousands of computer chips." (credit: Midjourney)
Despite recently calling for a six-month pause in the development of powerful AI models, Twitter CEO Elon Musk recently purchased roughly 10,000 GPUs for a generative AI project within Twitter, reports Business Insider, citing people familiar with the company. The exact nature of the project, however, is still a mystery.
GPUs, or graphics processing units, are purpose-built chips originally designed for computer graphics, but their massively parallel designs make them ideal for doing generative AI processing as well. Training (creating) a new AI model usually requires a large amount of computing power, including many GPUs, which means that Musk's acquisition could represent a significant commitment toward developing a deep-learning AI model within Twitter.
In late February, The Information broke news that Musk had approached AI researchers to form a new AI lab to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT, including former DeepMind researchers Igor Babuschkin and Manuel Kroiss. Earlier, Musk had publicly complained about bias in OpenAI's products, saying they were too "woke." Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but left the company after an internal disagreement in 2018.