Elon Musk reports construction of ‘Computing Gigafactory’ for AI

Billionaire tycoon Elon Musk’s xAI plans to work with Oracle to build a supercomputer to power the next version of its “Grok” artificial intelligence (AI) large-scale language model.

The project is structured as a “Gigafactory of Compute” to train and develop the company’s next-generation Grok AI systems, according to a report by The Information, citing a public presentation to xAI stakeholders.

Related: Political correctness in AI systems is the biggest concern: Elon Musk

As Cointelegraph reported last April, Musk had previously sought to raise $4 billion for the company at a $15 billion valuation, with follow-up comments saying the funds would be used to increase GPU count from about 10,000 to 100,000.

Afterwards, it was reported that Musk raised the valuation to $18 billion and the fundraising target to $6 billion due to high interest from investors.

If the information in The Information is accurate and xAI intends to build a supercomputer, the funds will likely be used to transform a cluster of 100,000 GPUs into a unified supercomputer architecture, or as xAI puts it, a “Gigafactory of Compute.” At certain Tesla factories called “Gigafactories.”

The move comes as Musk begins to raise expectations about the company’s capabilities and progress toward its ultimate goal of building AI that can surpass human cognitive abilities.

Musk told event attendees at the VivaTech 2024 conference in Paris that xAI will catch up with industry leaders OpenAI and DeepMind Google by the end of 2024. He went on to say that AI systems will be able to do it. By the end of 2025, everything will be better than humans.

According to Musk, the world’s richest man, such a system could replace all human employment and make us question our purpose. As he puts it, “Would your life have meaning if computers and robots could do everything better than you?”

Musk acknowledged that perhaps our role in the future will be “to give meaning to AI.”