Microsoft is developing an AI Chip

Plus Adobe bets big on AI and Youtube legend weighs in on AI filmmaking

Author

The Alignment
April 18, 2023

Hi folks, Microsoft has been secretly developing an AI chip for the past 4 years. Adobe is going all in on deploying AI to their entire creative cloud and Casey Neistat made an entire video with AI. Lets get to it

As always if you enjoy reading our posts be sure to spread the word !

Microsoft’s AI push is not just about software. Microsoft has been working on a custom chip since 2019 under the codename Athena. The chip has been purposefully designed to work with large language models as an alternative to overly relying on Nvidia for hardware capabilities.

The chip is being tested by both Microsoft and OpenAI employees. This development is significant because the demand for high-end chips is only going to increase. ChatGPT which is still in “beta” will need more than 30,000 NVidia A100 GPUs alone.

While selling these chips to end users is unclear, the company does indeed have plans to scale and deploy this chip internally within Microsoft and OpenAI. These in-house chips will not really be competing with Nvidia, whose sole existence is to build chips. Instead these chips are going to be used to alleviate the cost of training models as they continue to get more compute intensive.

Microsoft has made custom chips in the past. And so have other big tech players like Amazon, Google and Meta. The TPU was a very successful project for Google for an AI specific chip. Let’s see what gains Microsoft can make with its chip.

The Adobe creative cloud is the go to creative suite for most artists and editors. Now Adobe is bringing its AI platform "Firefly" into its creative cloud.

With Firefly, users will be able to edit their videos using simple prompts. Changing a video’s colour grade, creating subtitles, transition effects, scripts and storyboarding, everything will eventually be controllable using a prompt.

This is an ambitious attempt by Adobe to supercharge its offerings and bolster the subscription business used by millions of people.

It's worth nothing that Adobe is only using its proprietary stock images and publicly available databases, which might mean inferior results compared to Midjourney and other platforms. It's doing so to protect itself from mounting lawsuits against the Generative AI industry.

It's too early to tell how this move will pan out, but it has the ability to shake the entire creative industry.

Around the industry -

  1. AI work sparks fierce debate after winning photo award

  2. ChatGPT Poised to Expose Corporate Secrets, Cyber Firm Warns

  3. FTC warns that AI technology like ChatGPT could ‘turbocharge’ fraud

  4. Europe spins up AI research hub to apply accountability rules on Big Tech

  5. AI-powered retina scanning startup Mediwhale raises $9M

  6. Adobe Lightroom adds AI-powered denoise and support for content credentials

  7. Superchat’s new AI chatbot lets you message historical and fictional characters via ChatGPT

  8. Google CEO Sundar Pichai warns society to brace for impact of A.I. in new 60 minutes interview

  9. Meta’s released DINOv2, a method for training self supervised computer vision models

Product Corner -

Cool products to check out

  • Shorty : Dictate questions through Siri and have ChatGPT answer them

  • ThinkGPT : Python library aimed at prompting models to think, reason, and to create generative agents.

  • Kidgeni : AI art generator for kids

  • Coolaiid : Unique interior design ideas at your fingertips

  • MagickPen : Draw, write and erase with ease

  • Geniea :Optimise your mid journey prompts

Casey Neistat knows a thing or two about filmmaking, lets see what he thinks about filmmaking for AI.