. . AI: Nvidia: New Chips and AI Developer Software (3.18.24)

Nvidia, Apple, Google's Gemini AI, X

Author

Marshall Kirkpatrick
March 18, 2024

Friends, in today's edition, see Nvidia strengthen their moat as they announced their new Blackwell chips and a new AI developer software platform. We also see more headlines from Apple as they play catchup in the world of AI and xAI open sourcing Grok, advancing Elon's desire to make OpenAI an outlier in a world of open AI.

As you read about NVIDIA below, if you want to see a Harvard case study of its CUDA platform strategy, written in 2020, it’s a good short read.

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-Marshall Kirkpatrick, Editor

First impacted: AI companies, AI developers, Chip suppliers
Time to impact: Short

Nvidia has launched a new generation of AI chips and software. The new GPU offers a significant performance upgrade with 20 petaflops in AI performance compared to 4 petaflops for the previous H100 chip. The new 'Blackwell' chips also includes what Nvidia calls a “transformer engine" specifically built to run transformers-based AI (one of the core technologies underpinning LLMs). The new chips are expected to be available later this year. Nvidia also announced new software called NIM (Nvidia Inference Microservice), which allows for easier deployment of AI based products on a variety of Nvidia platforms and simplifies the ramp up time for generative AI developers. [Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announces new AI chips: ‘We need bigger GPUs’] Share this story by email

First impacted: iPhone users, Software developers
Time to impact: Short

Apple is negotiating with Google to license its Gemini products for use in upcoming iPhone features, according to a report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. It was also reported that Apple had discussions with OpenAI about the potential use of its model in future software releases. Despite developing its own AI technology, codenamed Ajax, Apple is said to be considering partnerships because competitors have superior AI products. Some expect a potential agreement to be announced at Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June. [Apple Is in Talks to Let Google Gemini Power iPhone AI Features] Share this story by email

First impacted: AI developers, Data scientists
Time to impact: Short

xAI has launched the Grok-1 model, a Mixture-of-Experts model with 314 billion parameters, under the Apache 2.0 license. The model was completed in October 2023 and the base model was trained on text data and is not fine-tuned for any particular task. As we shared in our earlier coverage of this, the open sourcing of Grok-1 is significant as it highlights Elon Musk's support for the open source AI movement (and again contrasting it with the fact that OpenAI is not open source). [Open Release of Grok-1] Share this story by email

First impacted: Software Developers, Data Scientists
Time to impact: Short

Yohei Nakajima, famous AI investor and innovator, has launched "MindGraph," a proof of concept starter kit for building and querying an ever-expanding knowledge graph with natural language. Nakajima says the system supports multiple input types, a simple interface, basic search/RAG against the knowledge graph, and is easily extendable with integrations and basic database swapping. [via @yoheinakajima] Share this story by email