Elon Musk plans a "supercomputer" to power his Grok 3 chatbot

Elon Musk is planning a "supercomputer" to power Grok 3, his next-generation AI chatbot.

Multi-hatted CEO Elon Musk is also the founder of artificial intelligence startup xAI. Earlier this week, he unveiled plans to build a supercomputer. This "computing gigafactory" should be operational by autumn 2025. The supercomputer will power an enhanced version of the company's AI chatbot, Grok. The project is expected to cost several billion and use tens of thousands of NVIDIA H100 GPUs.

Musk's ambitious GPU requirements for Grok 3

Musk indicated that the third iteration of Grok would require at least 100,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs. A significant increase on the 20,000 GPUs used to run Grok 2.0. The planned GPU cluster is expected to be four times larger than all those currently used by xAI's competitors. The current version of Grok, version 1.5, released in April 2024, can process visual information and text. An ambitious project, given that GPU and power shortages are the two main obstacles to AI development. According to Musk, progress in AI technology is currently hampered by two main factors: the shortage of advanced processors - such as Nvidia's H100, because it's not easy to get 100,000 of them quickly - and the availability of electricity. Indeed, Nvidia's H100 GPU consumes around 700 W when in full use, so 100,000 GPUs for AI and HPC workloads could consume 70 megawatts of power. Given that these GPUs need servers and cooling to operate, it's safe to say that a data center with 100,000 Nvidia H100 processors will consume around 100 megawatts of power. That's comparable to the electricity consumption of a small town.

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General Artificial Intelligence (GAI) could overtake human intelligence as early as next year or by 2026

Despite the challenges, Elon Musk has no intention of giving up on his project. According to him, "an artificial intelligence that is smarter than the smartest human" will see the light of day in the next year or two. "If you define AGI as being smarter than the smartest human, I think it will probably be next year, two years from now," Musk said in an interview on X Spaces. That means it's apparently time to revisit Terminator and hope that our future AGI overlords will be kinder than Skynet.

Potential partnership with Oracle for supercomputer development

Reports suggest that xAI could potentially collaborate with Oracle to develop this colossal IT system. However, neither xAI nor Oracle have confirmed these speculations. NVIDIA H100 GPUs, which dominate the market for AI data center chips, are often difficult to acquire due to high demand. Musk's proposed supercomputer would host connected clusters of these chips, four times larger than the largest existing GPU clusters.

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