We had started forgetting hard facts about the tech world as AI started hitting us right in our faces, with the release of ChatGPT on 30th of Nov 2022. It was slowly being believed that the players who were pioneers will keep leading for all times to come. Their theories and business models were believed to be the gospel truth, and it was being propagated in the very manner. The founders / CEOs started basking in glory, well deserving ones, but they started predicting the AI trajectory with precision and of their companies as unassailable, was certainly unacceptable.
You cannot write anybody off in technology and more so the established players. Satya Nadella had told them that Google has not been the pioneer in many of the technologies they lead, they have earned this by battling it out. We were made to believe in that euphoria that the AI world is limited to Sam Altman / OpenAI and Jensen Huang / Nvidia. As the AI story unfolded the depth, intensity, magnitude and scale started coming out in the open. There was much more to it, than what was dished out to the world initially.
DeepSeek turned the AI world upside down. Outliers being non-existent or being dismissive of them does not serve any purpose. Gemini and a few others are also very serious contenders. That’s for the LLM component, next is the compute. Nvidia has made us believe that they are the present and future of AI computing. But that was not to be. AMD has just unveiled its next generation AI chips, Instinct MI400, details of which are coming to the public domain. CEO Lisa Su presented the chips at a launch event in San Jose, California. Their design has been for “rack-scale” systems crucial for powering massive AI computations.
The startling revelation was when Su claimed that AMD’s MI355X can outperform Nvidia’s Blackwell chips. The MI400 series chips are designed to be assembled into a full server rack, dubbed Helios, and can be described as a unified system capable of tying thousands of chips together. Su explained, “For the first time, we architected every part of the rack as a unified system. Lo and behold, a significant endorsement came from OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, who appeared on the stage with Su. Altman expressed confidence in the new chips. AMD’s rack-scale technology aims to put its latest chips squarely in competition with Nvidia’s Blackwell chips.
ARE WE ON THE VERGE OF THE AI CHIP HISTORY BEING WRITTEN AGAIN.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.