Why Oracle disappoints Elon Musk on AI processors
Elon Musk's artificial intelligence, Grok, needs a lot of computing power: much more than what Oracle can provide it, according to president Larry Ellison. All the details
Oracle is having trouble keeping up with Elon Musk's demands.
The president of the US software company, Larry Ellison, recently recalled, during a call with investors, the high computing power necessary for training and using artificial intelligence systems. “We have obtained enough NVIDIA GPUs for Elon Musk's company, xAI , to launch the first version” of its language model, called Grok. But from xAI “they wanted much more,” Ellison added. “They wanted a lot more GPUs than we gave them.”
THE ORACLE-NVIDIA PARTNERSHIP
A collaboration has long existed between Oracle and NVIDIA which – as Quartz explains – brings together the software of the former and the advanced processors of the latter to encourage the development of artificial intelligence. Language models like OpenAI's well-known GPT-4 use thousands of high-performance microchips: this is why NVIDIA's H100, a graphics processing unit priced at $40,000 each, “has become one of the most wanted in Silicon Valley,” writes Quartz . Last June Ellison made it known that Oracle was spending "billions" to acquire them.
CAN ORACLE SATISFY GROK'S THIRST FOR COMPUTING?
Experts have some doubts about the actual usefulness of Grok, the xAI chatbot which should draw on content present on X (the social network previously known as Twitter and purchased by Musk) and include jokes in its interactions with users. But regardless of whether or not Grok should be taken seriously, what is certain is that the model needs a lot of computing power. However, it is not clear whether Oracle will be able to provide it.
As Brad Zelnick, a Deutsche Bank analyst present on the call with investors, recalled, it took Oracle several years to build sixty-six cloud data centers: how much time will it need, therefore, to build another hundred as promised (and as necessary to satisfy the demand from the technology industry)?
ORACLE'S RESULTS IN THE THIRD QUARTER
In the third quarter of the year, Oracle reported slightly higher-than-expected profits of $2.5 billion, but slightly lower-than-expected revenue of $12.9 billion. The results disappointed the market: on Tuesday 12 December Oracle shares lost around 10 percent.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/oracle-gpu-intelligenza-artificiale-elon-musk/ on Sun, 17 Dec 2023 06:10:55 +0000.