The AI chip shortage is causing headaches for tech giants such as OpenAI. Among those hardest hit, though, are the startups trying to build their own AI models—so-called neolabs that need to use their limited funding to secure access to enormous clusters of graphics processing units for the compute-intensive task of model training.“It’s like VC currency right now to know the current price of GPUs,” said Evan Morikawa, who recently finished talking with about 17 different AI cloud providers in search of compute for his startup Generalist, which trains AI models for robotics. Morikawa compared searching for AI chips to exploring distant lands: “At a San Francisco dinner party, this is the equivalent of returning from the Far East,” he joked.Startups training their own models require hundreds or thousands of GPUs or similar AI chips. When Morikawa was in the market for hundreds of chips last winter, he said cloud computing providers were offering contracts at reasonable prices with durations as short as 1 year. Six months into a 1-year contract, Generalist needed more compute, so Morikawa set out again to hunt for around a thousand chips.
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