In a move aimed at solving the shortage of expensive AI chips, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is exploring making its own artificial intelligence chips and it has gone as far as evaluating a potential acquisition target.
Diversifying its suppliers beyond Nvidia, the company says it would be working more closely with other chip makers including Nvidia, a company that dominates more than 80% of the global market for the chips best suited to run AI applications.
Open AI’s CEO, Sam Altman has put the acquisition of more AI chips on the top priority for the company having publicly expressed dissatisfaction over the scarcity of graphics processing units.
The effort to get more chips is based on two major concerns as identified by Altman; a shortage of the advanced processors that power OpenAI’s software and the high cost of running the hardware necessary to power its efforts and products.
OpenAI has since 2020, developed its generative artificial intelligence technologies on a massive supercomputer constructed by Microsoft, one of its largest backers, that uses 10,000 of Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs).
Running ChatGPT is very expensive for the company as each query costs roughly 4 cent and If ChatGPT queries grow to a tenth the scale of Google search, it would require roughly $48.1 billion worth of GPUs initially and about $16 billion worth of chips a year to keep it operational.
Yemi Olajutemu
Philips Babatunde