Published 12:18 IST, April 13th 2023

Twitter CEO Elon Musk buys thousands of GPUs for major generative AI project: Report

Despite advocating for an industry-wide halt to AI training, Elon Musk has reportedly kicked off a major AI project within Twitter, according to a report.

Reported by: Digital Desk
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Image: PTI/Twitter | Image: self
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Although Twitter CEO Elon Musk has called for a stop to AI training across industry, it has been reported that he has initiated a significant artificial intelligence endeavour within Twitter. As part of project, which focuses on a large langu model (LLM), company has acquired roughly 10,000 GPUs (graphics processing unit) and enlisted AI experts from DeepMind, according to a report from Business Insider.

Two anymous sources in report have revealed that CEO of Twitter has acquired almost 10,000 GPUs for utilisation on platform. As a rule, GPUs are employed in handling of large-scale AI models due to ermous computational power that techlogy demands. This decision seems to be in line with a tweet from Elon Musk on March 18, in which he expressed intention to apply AI for purpose of "detecting and drawing attention to manipulation of public opinion" on Twitter.

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specifics of GPUs that Twitter has obtained are currently unkwn. Neverless, company is said to have invested tens of millions of dollars in acquiring se computational GPUs, despite facing ongoing financial difficulties, which Elon Musk has described as an "unstable financial situation".

It is anticipated that GPUs will be deployed in one of Twitter's two remaining data centers, with Atlanta being most probable location. Curiously, Musk shuttered Twitter's primary data center in Sacramento towards end of December, a move that would undoubtedly have reduced company's computational capacity.

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Twitter expanding its engineering team: Report

Along with procurement of GPU hardware for its generative AI project, Twitter is also expanding its engineering team. company has recently brought on board Igor Babuschkin and Manuel Kroiss, who are both engineers from AI research firm DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet. It appears that Elon Musk has been actively searching for AI talent to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT since at least February of this year.

se recent developments have occurred just a few weeks after Elon Musk, along with thousands of or researchers in tech industry, signed an open letter calling for a temporary halt in development of AI, citing risk it poses to humanity.

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Moreover, Musk had also expressed his concerns regarding AI back in 2017 while addressing United States National Goverrs Association. At event, he warned regulators that AI research needs to be regulated "before it's too late".

Large companies such as Twitter typically purchase hardware in bulk, which allows m to take advant of special rates. For instance, when Nvidia's H100 boards are purchased individually from retailers such as CDW, y can cost more than $10,000 per unit. This suggests that Twitter may have spent a substantial amount of money on hardware for its AI initiative.

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12:18 IST, April 13th 2023