Billionaire mogul Elon Musk’s xAI has plans to build a supercomputer in partnership with Oracle to power the next version of its “Grok” artificial intelligence (AI) large language model.
According to a report from The Information, citing a presentation shown to xAI stakeholders, the project has been framed as a “Gigafactory of Compute” for training and developing the next generation of the company’s Grok AI system.
As Cointelegraph reported in April, Musk previously sought to raise $4 billion at a valuation of $15 billion for the company with follow-on commentary indicating that the funds would be used to raise its GPU count from around 10,000 to 100,000.
Shortly thereafter, it was reported that Musk raised the goal to raise $6 billion at a valuation of $18 billion due to high investor interest.
If The Information’s information is correct, and if xAI intends to build a supercomputer, it’s likely the funds will be used to turn the 100,000 GPU cluster into a unified supercomputer architecture — or a “Gigafactory of Compute,” as xAI puts it, a reference to certain Tesla factories dubbed “Gigafactories.”
These moves come as Musk has begun raising expectations around the company’s capabilities and progress towards its ultimate goal of building an AI capable of surpassing human cognitive abilities.
Speaking to event goers at the VivaTech 2024 conference in Paris, Musk said that he believed xAI would catch up to industry leaders OpenAI and DeepMind Google by the end of 2024.
He went on to say that he believed an AI system would be capable of doing everything better than humans by the end of 2025.
According to Musk, the world’s richest person, such a system would be capable of supplanting all human employment, leaving us to question our purpose. As he put it, “if the computer and robots can do everything better than you, does your life have meaning?”
Musk did concede that, perhaps, our role in the future will be to “give AI meaning.”
