On Wednesday, OpenAI introduced its first special AI chip. This is aimed at growing from just consumer products to being involved in AI infrastructure. The chip, called Jalapeño, was made with Broadcom to handle the computing for ChatGPT and Codex efficiently. OpenAI says it’s also built for future AI projects.
“While OpenAI is still measuring final performance, early testing shows that Jalapeño will deliver performance per watt substantially better than current state-of-the-art,” the company said.
OpenAI and Broadcom said last year they would make special chips for 10 gigawatts of computing. They revealed the first chip from this partnership on Wednesday.
Tech companies like Google and Amazon are making their own AI chips more and more. Custom chips help them improve performance for their own models and depend less on chip makers like Nvidia. OpenAI said Jalapeño is made just for big language models, not as a “general-purpose” chip.
“Nobody wants to be beholden to Nvidia,” Ben Barringer, global head of technology research at investment firm Quilter Cheviot, told CNN last November when asked about Google potentially challenging Nvidia in AI chips. “They are trying to diversify their chip footprint.”
OpenAI is preparing for an initial public offering that might be worth a trillion dollars. This puts more pressure on the company to show it can earn enough money to match that value.
There is a lot of money to be made in AI infrastructure. Chipmaker Nvidia became the most valuable company because its chips and systems are key parts of the data centers that run AI models.
AI companies are rushing to get the computing power and energy they need for better AI services. They are moving from basic chatbots to systems that work all the time. OpenAI has said before that they need to create a lot of AI infrastructure to lower the costs of using AI.
OpenAI is marketing the new chip to help lower costs for its AI models. This way, their services can be available to more people.
“By designing more of the stack ourselves, we can serve more intelligence with greater efficiency and keep pushing advanced AI toward broader access,” Greg Brockman, cofounder and president of OpenAI, said in the blog post.
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