Eventually, models could be trained without any dedicated hardware at all
Once, the world’s richest men competed over yachts, jets and private islands. Now, the size-measuring contest of choice is clusters. Just 18 months ago, OpenAI trained GPT-4, its then state-of-the-art large language model (LLM), on a network of around 25,000 then state-of-the-art graphics processing units (GPUs) made by Nvidia. Now Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, bosses of X and Meta respectively, are waving their chips in the air: Mr Musk says he has 100,000 GPUs in one data centre and plans to buy 200,000. Mr Zuckerberg says he’ll get 350,000.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “I can do it with a distributed heart”
From the January 11th 2025 edition
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