Nvidia today announced it will join forces with Microsoft with the objective to create a "massive" computer for AI applications based on cloud computing technology. This new AI system will run using Microsoft's Azure cloud. According to preliminary plans, it will contain tens of thousands of graphics processing units (GPUs), most likely those based on Nvidia's latest and most powerful H100 and A100 chips. The cost of the project was not disclosed, but industry experts say it is possible to estimate the total price based on the prices of individual GPU chips. For example, a single A100 is priced within a range from $10,000 to $12,000, while the H100 is even more expensive than that.

The collaboration will focus on integrating Ayar Labs' technology to develop scale-out architectures enabled by high-bandwidth, low-latency and ultra-low-power optical-based interconnects for future Nvidia products. Together, the companies plan to accelerate the development and adoption of optical I/O technology to support the explosive growth of AI and machine learning (ML) applications and data volumes. Optical I/O uniquely changes the performance and power trajectories of system designs by enabling compute, memory and networking ASICs to communicate with dramatically increased bandwidth, at lower latency, over longer distances and at a fraction of the power of existing electrical I/O solutions, say the companies. The technology is also foundational to enabling emerging heterogeneous compute systems, disaggregated/pooled designs, and unified memory architectures that are critical to accelerating future data center innovation. "Today's state-of-the-art AI/ML training architectures are limited by current copper-based compute-to-compute interconnects to build scale-out systems for tomorrow's requirements," says Charles Wuischpard, CEO of Ayar Labs.

The final push for the hat trick came down to the wire. Five minutes before the deadline, the team submitted work in its third and hardest data science competition of the year in recommendation systems. Called RecSys, it's a relatively new branch of computer science that's spawned one of the most widely used applications in machine learning, one that helps millions find what they want to watch, buy and play. The team's combination of six AI models packed into the contest's limit of 20 gigabytes all of the smarts it culled from studying 750 million data points. An unusual rule in the competition said the models had to run in less than 24 hours on a single core in a cloud CPU.

The woman in the photo seems familiar. She looks like Jennifer Aniston, the "Friends" actress, or Selena Gomez, the child star turned pop singer. She appears to be a celebrity, one of the beautiful people photographed outside a movie premiere or an awards show. She was created by a machine. The image is one of the faux celebrity photos generated by software under development at Nvidia, the big-name computer chip maker that is investing heavily in research involving artificial intelligence. At a lab in Finland, a small team of Nvidia researchers recently built a system that can analyze thousands of (real) celebrity snapshots, recognize common patterns, and create new images that look much the same -- but are still a little different.

The woman in the photo seems familiar. She looks like Jennifer Aniston, the "Friends" actress, or Selena Gomez, the child star turned pop singer. But not exactly. She appears to be a celebrity, one of the beautiful people photographed outside a movie premiere or an awards show. And yet, you cannot...

The woman in the photo seems familiar. She looks like Jennifer Aniston, the "Friends" actress, or Selena Gomez, the child star turned pop singer. She appears to be a celebrity, one of the beautiful people photographed outside a movie premiere or an awards show. That's because she's not real. She was created by a machine.

The woman in the photo seems familiar. She looks like Jennifer Aniston, the "Friends" actress, or Selena Gomez, the child star turned pop singer. She appears to be a celebrity, one of the beautiful people photographed outside a movie premiere or an awards show. She was created by a machine. The image is one of the faux celebrity photos generated by software under development at Nvidia, the big-name computer chip maker that is investing heavily in research involving artificial intelligence. At a lab in Finland, a small team of Nvidia researchers recently built a system that can analyze thousands of (real) celebrity snapshots, recognize common patterns, and create new images that look much the same -- but are still a little different.