invested US$1-billion in OpenAI in 2019, it agreed to build a massive, cutting-edge supercomputer for the artificial intelligence research start-up. The only problem: Microsoft didn’t have anything like what OpenAI needed and wasn’t totally sure it could build something that big in its Azure cloud service without it breaking.
The technology allowed OpenAI to release ChatGPT, the viral chatbot that attracted more than a million users within days of going public in November and is now getting pulled into other companies’ business models. As generative AI tools such as ChatGPT gain interest from businesses and consumers, more pressure will be put on cloud services providers such as Microsoft, Amazon.com and Google to ensure their data centres can provided the enormous computing power needed.
The new Bing is still in preview with Microsoft gradually adding more users from a waitlist. Guthrie’s team holds a daily meeting with about two dozen employees they’ve dubbed the “pit crew”, after the group of mechanics that tune race cars in the middle of the race. The group’s job is to figure out how to bring greater amounts of computing capacity online quickly, as well as fix problems that crop up.