A virtual supermachine Microsoft’s supercomputer has 285,000 processing cores, 10,000 GPUs and a 400-gigabit capacity connection link for each GPU server. The biggest difference between the company’s machine and other supercomputers, is that it is a virtual machine, integrated with its cloud computing platform, Azure. Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI Microsoft has announced that the supercomputer will serve exclusively OpenAI, a non-profit organization created to promote the safe and ethical use of artificial intelligence. Thus, the computational power of the machine will be used in projects for the development and maturation of artificial intelligence technology. This project, in fact, is an expansion of the partnership initiated between the two organizations, last year. Unimaginable applications The partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI, coupled with a computer of this size, aims to change the way machine learning systems operate. Currently, several of these systems work inefficiently: the database used for training is used in a restricted way. The idea is that, in the future, the algorithm’s training system can access and read billions of texts publicly available on the internet. This could allow a system to learn something new, based on a specific need and on demand. After analyzing code bases in repositories like GitHub, systems could even start programming. Do not be surprised if, in a few years, Microsoft releases a version of Windows in which Cortana behaves like the operating system of the movie “Her”.
