Elon Musk, the billionaire tycoon, has revealed his plans to collaborate with Oracle in order to construct a supercomputer for his xAI company. This supercomputer will be utilized to power the next iteration of the company’s Grok artificial intelligence (AI) language model. The project has been likened to a “Gigafactory of Compute” and is aimed at training and advancing the future generation of the Grok AI system.
Earlier this year, Musk aimed to raise $4 billion for xAI, valuing the company at $15 billion. This funding was intended to increase the GPU count from 10,000 to 100,000. However, due to considerable investor interest, Musk subsequently raised the fundraising goal to $6 billion with a valuation of $18 billion.
If the reports from The Information are accurate and xAI proceeds with building a supercomputer, it is likely that the funds will be utilized to transform the 100,000 GPU cluster into a cohesive supercomputer architecture. This concept is referred to as a “Gigafactory of Compute,” drawing inspiration from Tesla’s Gigafactories.
Musk has been setting high expectations for xAI, expressing his belief that the company will catch up to industry leaders OpenAI and DeepMind Google by the end of 2024. Furthermore, he anticipates that by the end of 2025, AI systems will surpass human capabilities in all domains. Musk, who is currently the world’s wealthiest individual, questions the purpose of human existence in a world where computers and robots outperform humans in every aspect.
However, Musk does suggest that in the future, humanity’s role may be to assign meaning to AI.