#079 Cerebras Systems: A New Era of AI with the World’s Largest Chip, Microsoft Adds AI Button Directly To The Keyboard
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AI BYTE #1 📢: Cerebras Systems: A New Era of AI with the World’s Largest Chip
⭐ The AI chip market is booming, thanks to the rising demand for advanced technologies across various industries and applications.
However, not all AI chips are created equal. Some are designed for specific tasks, such as Gen AI, which involves creating new data or content from existing data, such as images, text, or speech.
And for that it requires a lot of computing power, memory, and bandwidth, which are not well served by traditional chips such as CPUs or GPUs.
That’s where Cerebras Systems, a Silicon Valley startup, comes in. Cerebras has developed what it calls a Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE), which is the largest and fastest chip ever made, dedicated to AI.
The WSE is a single silicon wafer that contains 2.6 trillion transistors and 850,000 cores, all interconnected by a high-speed network. The WSE can perform AI tasks at unprecedented speed and efficiency, outperforming hundreds or thousands of GPUs or CPUs.
Cerebras claims that its WSE can accelerate a wide range of Gen AI applications, such as natural language processing, computer vision, drug discovery, and nuclear energy simulation. The company has already shipped its WSE to several high-profile customers, such as G42, a tech conglomerate in the United Arab Emirates, which ordered nine AI supercomputers powered by Cerebras, worth $100 million each.
Cerebras has also partnered with Colovore, a data center provider in Santa Clara, California, to offer its WSE as a cloud service to other customers.
Cerebras is not the only player in the AI chip market, as it faces competition from established giants such as Nvidia, Intel, and AMD, as well as other startups such as Graphcore, Groq, and SambaNova.
However, Cerebras has a unique advantage in its wafer-scale technology, which enables it to pack more compute power and memory on a single chip, reducing the latency and energy consumption that plague other solutions.
Cerebras is also one of the most well-funded AI chip startups, having raised $720 million in venture capital, valuing the company at over $4 billion. The company has also attracted top talent from the semiconductor industry, such as Julie Shin Choi, a former Intel executive, who joined Cerebras as its chief marketing officer in November 2023.
Cerebras is on a mission to democratize Gen AI and make it accessible to more researchers and practitioners. The company has released a series of seven GPT-based large language models for open use by the research community, trained on its WSE.
The company has also collaborated with Argonne National Laboratory, a US Department of Energy research center, to develop a new AI chip benchmark, called MLPerf HPC, which measures the performance of AI chips on high-performance computing workloads.
AI BYTE #2 📢: Microsoft Adds AI Button Directly To The Keyboard
⭐ Microsoft has announced a major redesign of its PC keyboards that will introduce a new way to interact with AI chatbots.
Starting this month, some new personal computers that run Microsoft’s Windows operating system will have a special “Copilot key” that launches the software giant’s AI chatbot, Copilot.
Copilot is a conversational agent that can help users with various tasks, such as searching the web, creating content, translating text, and more. Copilot is powered by ChatGPT, a cutting-edge AI model developed by OpenAI, a research organization that Microsoft has a close partnership with.
ChatGPT is capable of generating natural language responses based on a large corpus of text data, such as news articles, books, and web pages.
By adding a dedicated AI button to its keyboards, Microsoft is aiming to make AI more accessible and ubiquitous for its users. The Copilot key will be located near the space bar, and users can press it to activate Copilot’s voice or text interface.
Users can then ask Copilot questions, give commands, or chat casually with the AI agent.
The Copilot key will be the biggest change to Microsoft’s keyboards since it introduced the Windows key in the 1990s. The Windows key, which features Microsoft’s four-squared logo, allows users to access the Start menu and other Windows functions. The Copilot key, which features a ribbon-like logo, will allow users to access the AI chatbot and other AI functions.
Microsoft is not the only company that has experimented with customized keys on its keyboards. Apple pioneered the concept in the 1980s with its “Command” key, which allows users to perform shortcuts and commands on Mac computers.
Google has a search button on its Chromebooks, which allows users to access Google’s search engine and other Google apps. Google also tried to introduce an AI-specific key on its Pixelbook, which allowed users to launch Google’s voice assistant, but the Pixelbook was discontinued in 2021.
However, Microsoft has a much stronger hold on the PC market than its competitors, thanks to its licensing agreements with third-party manufacturers like Lenovo, Dell, and HP.
According to market research firm IDC, about 82% of all desktop computers, laptops, and workstations run Windows, compared to 9% for Apple’s in-house operating system and just over 6% for Google’s. Microsoft has not yet revealed which computer-makers are installing the Copilot button, but some of them are expected to unveil their new models at the CES gadget show in Las Vegas.
The Copilot key is part of Microsoft’s strategy to capitalize on its partnership with OpenAI and leverage its generative AI technology.
Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, and has since collaborated with the organization on several AI projects, such as Azure Cognitive Services, GitHub Copilot, and Minecraft AI. Microsoft also has exclusive access to OpenAI’s supercomputer, which can run ChatGPT and other AI models at unprecedented scale and speed.
The Copilot key is a bold move by Microsoft to reshape the next generation of keyboards and computing. It represents both an opportunity and a risk for the company, as it tries to position itself as a leader and a gateway for AI applications.
It also represents a new way for users to interact with AI chatbots, which could have profound implications for the future of communication, education, entertainment, and more.