ChatGPT owner OpenAI is putting efforts to develop its own artificial intelligence chips which are required to run the famous chatbot. The owners want to manufacture their own chips to solve the problem of AI chip shortage, the company is also aiming to expand the suppliers and test custom chips.
OpenAI Aiming To Make Its Own Chips
ChatGPT owned by OpenAI is considering the possibilities of developing its own artificial intelligence chips to resolve the inadequate supply of AI Chips and to lessen its high expenditure on expensive chips. The company is putting efforts to procure and manufacture these chips as it is very necessary for the operational activity of the Chatbot.
Recently, Microsoft owned Bing Chat faced issues in generating images which affected user’s experience, the reason behind was insufficiency of GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit).The tech giant also brought more GPUs to boost the functioning which solved the problem to some extent but not completely.
Tech companies are trying to procure more and more GPUs and chips to prevent operational crises and to enable proper functionality in case the shortage worsens. In the previous year, Microsoft considered options to resolve the shortage issue. The options included – To build in-house chips, diversify its suppliers and to associate closely with chip making companies such as NVIDIA, which acquires roughly 80% of the market space.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI has complained about the shortage of Graphics Processing Units (GPU) and has said that procurement of more AI chips is a priority for the company. However, it will be challenging for the company to move ahead and in the meantime the company will rely on outside supply.
According to a report, the cost of each query made in ChatGPT is approximately around 4 cents which means that if search queries grow in future, the chatbot will require more AI chips leading to higher expenditure.
Reason Behind Scarcity Of AI Chips
Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is a necessary hardware that helps in running countless calculations and algorithms deployment in artificial intelligence.
During the period of Covid- 19 pandemic which affected every sector globally, it also affected the IT industry. During the pandemic, remote education and work from home became a need which increased the demand for computers and electronics and also the chips required in them.The production units suffered during the pandemic which led to the short supply and an increase in demand for the GPUs.
The increasing use of artificial intelligence and services is escalating the demand for artificial intelligence chips. The need for advanced work such as high quality image generation and graphics is also adding up to the increased demand.
While testifying before the US Senate in May, CEO of OpenAI said that they are so short on GPUs, the less people that use the tool, the better it is.
If the company begins building in-house chips, it will decrease the operational cost and will ensure smooth functioning. However, the company might still have to procure the chips from the commercial market.
OpenAI and ChatGPT
OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory. It was founded in 2015 by Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Jessica Livingston, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba with Sam Altman and elon Musk as the initial board members.
The company also owns the famous ChatGPT, the name stands for “Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer”. It was launched on 30th November 2022. The chatbot enables a user to give prompts in a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language and it gives a response accordingly. It is also the fastest growing commercial software application. The most recent model of the chatbot is ChatGPT-4.
