Elon’s Colossus: The AI Toy That Needs a Power-Up!
Summary
Well, well, well, if it isn’t Elon Musk throwing his hat into the AI supercomputer ring with a fresh piece of tech that sounds like it could fold laundry and walk the dog. His company, xAI, just unveiled Colossus—a supercomputer that’s flexing its muscles with a staggering 100,000 Nvidia GPUs. Yes, folks, that’s more graphics processing units than you have friends on social media! This new toy is like a goliath in the AI world, and Musk is hoping it helps him play catch-up to the cool kids on the block like Meta. To give you a perspective, while Colossus sits in the gym bench pressing 100,000 GPUs, Meta’s Llama 3 is curling with just 16,000 H100 chips. Meta, not one to be left behind in the game of tech one-upmanship, is busy planning to pump up their chips even more. But hold those horses! Not everyone’s ready to throw a “Musk is amazing” party just yet. Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s cofounder and the ultimate party pooper, called Colossus ‘table stakes’ in the competition arena of generative AI, implying that, sure, it’s great—like having a shiny new toy—but it merely helps xAI keep up with the other brainiacs like OpenAI and Anthropic. Then there’s Chris Lattner, CEO of Modular AI, who pointed out that Musk’s reliance on Nvidia chips is, well, a bit rich for someone talking about building his own chips with Dojo. It’s like having a pizza joint but always ordering from the fancy place next door. Musk, though, insists he’s on a quest to diminish his dependence on Nvidia, claiming he has a secret weapon in the wings (cue the superhero music) with Dojo. But let’s not forget the energy crisis drama. Sure, Musk boasts about having ran Colossus up and running in just 122 days (surpassing your average pizza delivery timeline), but there are whispers about how this massive power-hungry machine actually runs. Little birds say that xAI resorted to gas turbines to juice things up, kind of like borrowing your neighbor’s Wi-Fi to binge-watch the latest series. And a local utility claimed xAI was playing fast and loose with electricity, swaggering around and allegedly installing unpermitted turbines—a move that’s sure to earn it a stern talking-to at the neighborhood watch meeting! So, will Musk’s Colossus power through and become the new king of AI hill or is it just jumping on the bandwagon late like that friend who only shows up when the pizza arrives? Only time will tell, but laughs will definitely be had along the way!
Original Source: www.businessinsider.com
