Sambanova Tackles Generative AI With New Chip And New Approach
The Next Platform, Wednesday, September 20,2023
If you have the entire corpus of the Internet scrubbed of nonsense plus whatever else you can scrounge up in whatever language all put into the right format so you can chew on that data one token at a time with trillions of parameters of interconnections between those tokens to build a large language model for generative AI applications, you have an enormous problem.
Finding $1 billion, of which maybe $800 million will end up going to Nvidia, is only one of those problems. Finding someone to sell you the 20,000 or so of Nvidia's 'Hopper' H100 GPUs is another problem, and if you can't do that, then getting the budget together to pay even more to rent those GPUs on a public cloud and lining up the capacity is also a huge problem.
Luckily for the Global 2000, not a single one needs to train their own LLM from scratch. And what is true of these upper echelon companies is also true of what we would call all bust a handful of the Global 50,000, the list of organizations that include large enterprises, HPC centers, hyperscalers and cloud builders, national and regional governments, and large academic institutions on planet Earth.