Microsoft is producing artificial intelligence chip – 04/18/2023 – Tech

Microsoft is developing its own artificial intelligence chip codenamed “Athena” that will power the technology behind chatbots such as ChatGPT, The Information reported Tuesday, citing two sources familiar with the matter.

The company, which was an early backer of OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT, has been working on the microprocessor since 2019, which is being tested by a small group of Microsoft and OpenAI employees, the report said.

According to the website, the chips will be used to train broad-language models and support inference, both of which are needed for generative artificial intelligence, like that used in ChatGPT, to process large amounts of data, recognize patterns, and create new outputs for imitate human conversation.

Microsoft hopes the chip will outperform those purchased from other vendors, saving time and money on its costly advances in artificial intelligence, the report said. Other big tech companies, including Amazon and Google, also make their own AI chips in-house.

So far, chipmaker Nvidia has dominated the market for these types of chips.

Microsoft and Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The rollout is being fast-tracked by Microsoft following the success of ChatGPT, The Information said. The maker of Windows this year launched its own artificial intelligence search engine, Bing AI, capitalizing on its partnership with OpenAI and trying to grab a share of the market currently dominated by Google.