GenAI race hots up as Microsoft launches own AI chips

livemint.com:

OpenAI, and stave off competition from chipmakers like Intel and AMD. While Microsoft’s Azure Maia AI Accelerator has been optimized for AI- and generative AI-specific tasks, its Azure Cobalt CPU (central processing unit) is an Arm-based processor that will cater to general-purpose tasks on Microsoft Cloud. Microsoft has reportedly been working on developing an AI chip since 2019.

Code-named Athena internally, the AI chip was also made available to a small group of Microsoft and OpenAI employees for testing, but Microsoft never officially confirmed the development. In a July 2021 blog, Microsoft described ‘Project Maia’ as a deep learning framework that plays chess to explore the relationship between humans and AI. For Maia, the company used a deep reinforcement learning neural network that was earlier used to predict the optimal move for a given chess board position and retrained it to predict what a human player would do.

Microsoft had then said that "The larger vision of Maia is to create a more productive relationship between humans and AI in chess, with the hope of applying these learnings to other domains". Maia, in its current avatar, has already been tested by Microsoft-backed OpenAI. According to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.