- AI Tangle
- Posts
- ☕️ xAI's 100K GPU AI Training Cluster "Colossus" Goes Live
☕️ xAI's 100K GPU AI Training Cluster "Colossus" Goes Live
Elon Musk's AI adventure continues as his startup, xAI, turns on its biggest Nvidia-powered AI training cluster to date, Colossus, for the first time this weekend. Other key highlights of the week include:
Amazon chooses Anthropic's Claude to power the voice assistant of the company's paid Alexa version
Cohere's made-for-enterprise Command R and Command R+ models receive a new update package
A pair of far-right activists and convicted felons, Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman launch an AI lobbying company
Join us at AI Tangle as we untangle this week's happenings in AI!
THE BIG AI STORY
Though Elon Musk's AI venture with the release of xAI's original Grok-1 model might've gotten off to a slow start, the company bounced back with Grok-2 and quickly became a major player among the likes of OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic. Now, as if to keep the ball rolling, CEO Elon Musk announced in an X/Twitter post that his team had gotten an AI training cluster of 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs online just this weekend.
What does this mean for xAI?
Grok-2, the company's latest and most capable albeit slightly controversial model, was trained on a cluster of 25,000 of Nvidia's enterprise-grade H100 GPUs. Colossus, which Musk states took his team and partners a total of 122 days to get up and running, boasts 4x the computational power, which would allow xAI to create even more sophisticated and potent models at a pace comparable to or beyond industry leaders. Moreover, Colossus will double in size "in a few months" with an additional 50,000 of Nvidia's H200 GPUs.
5 QUICK HITS
Following early news of Amazon's plans to release a paid Alexa subscription dubbed "Remarkable Alexa," recent reports state that Anthropic's Claude has been chosen to power the paid version of Alexa's voice assistant. The Reuters report says that early versions of Remarkable Alexa used Amazon's in-house models, but they struggled with user prompts and were deemed insufficient. With an estimated price tag between $5-10/month, Remarkable Alexa is expected to debut in the middle of October, with a demo predicted for Amazon's device and services event sometime in September.
In a recent blog post by the Cohere team, the company has released improved versions of its enterprise-grade AI models, Command R and Command R+. The latest update package brings significant improvements in coding, math, reasoning, and data analysis, along with making them both more efficient and affordable. The package also adds features like structured outputs and customizable safety modes. The updated models are available for developers through Cohere's API and Amazon's Sagemaker.
Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, far-right activists and convicted felons, are reportedly running a company called LobbyMatic that is selling an AI platform called that automates lobbying tasks. The pair, going under the pseudonyms "Jay Klein" and "Bill Sanders" respectively, appear to be trying to rebrand themselves in the tech world. Though Wohl and Burkman haven't directly confirmed their identities, former employees and investigative findings suggest involvement, which puts the fledgling company under heavy pressure and scrutiny.
Amazon has recently hired Covariant’s founders Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen, and Rocky Duanalong along with "about a quarter" of the companies' staff. Covariant, a robotics startup based in Berkeley, creates AI models and AI-powered products for robots in manufacturing, the foundation models of which Amazon has secured a non-exclusive license for. Covariant itself, however, will continue operating under the leadership of Ted Stinson and Tianhao Zhang with the former stepping up from the position of COO to CEO.
SparkLabs has closed a new $50 million fund, dubbed the AIM AI Fund, to back early-stage AI startups, with those from its AIM-X accelerator in Saudi Arabia and others globally being the main focus. Known for supporting OpenAI and other AI ventures, SparkLabs plans to invest in "50 to 70 companies," with 35% of the fund going to accelerator participants and the rest to Series A and Series B investments. SparkLabs operates 14 funds worldwide and has invested in over 550 companies.
4 AI TOOLS
Smodin - Made for students, teachers, and writers, Smodin is an AI writing tool for writing essays, articles, and paraphrasing text with features such as rewriters, summarizers, plagiarism checkers, and multi-lingual translators.
Durable - Durable makes setting up online businesses quick and simple with its AI-based no-code platform together with SEO, marketing tools, and review automation.
Persuva - Persuva aims to take marketing and sales campaigns to the next level, allowing teams to easily craft tailor-made ads that speak to your audience as you know them.
Odaptos - Uncover potential user experience problems with Odaptos, an AI-powered analytics problem on a mission to enhance user experience and turn feedback into usable insights.
AI READ & WATCH
Why Emotion AI & Business Software Shouldn't Mix (2-min read)
"Emotion AI" is, as the name might imply, the area of developing an understanding of human emotions in a bot, and it's a trend that companies worldwide are hopping on as they race to embed AI into their products - here's why this is problematic.
A Robot For The Home (18-min watch)
Household robots have been a touted concept for decades, but 1X Technologies' NEO might just be the closest realization of that. Join S3 as they go on an exclusive tour at 1X Technologies to discover what's going on and how the company plans to bring humanoid robots to the home.