Microsoft announces AI supercomputer

Microsoft has announced that it built ‘one of the top five publicly disclosed supercomputers in the world […] to train extremely large artificial intelligence (AI) models’. The supercomputer was developed in collaboration with OpenAI and is designed to be used for the company’s AI models, in particular in the areas of natural language processing and computer vision. In its announcement, Microsoft also noted that it is exploring multitasking AI models that ‘can learn in a generalised way across text, images and video’. Large scale AI models – which can perform multiple tasks – are considering a step forward towards ‘designing AI models that might one day understand the world more like people do starts with language, a critical component to understanding human intent, making sense of the vast amount of written knowledge in the world and communicating more effortlessly’.