OpenAI purchase $51 million of AI accelerator chips from Rain AI
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World-leading AI firm OpenAI are investing $51 million USD into AI acceleration hardware from Rain AI. The Silicon Valley AI chip startup, headquartered in San Francisco like its investor, has backing from OpenAI Co-founder Sam Altman. How will these AI chips help?
What is Rain AI?
Rain Neuromorphics (also known as Rain AI) is self-described as the world’s leading “algorithm/hardware co-design” firm for artificial intelligence. A full-stack approach to designing code that makes efficient use of hardware, and hardware that effectively accommodates the code, is how top companies are optimising AI performance beyond the competition. This is easier said than done, of course, and requires some very expensive, very technical staff.
This is also the approach being taken by NVIDIA, the world’s leading consumer graphics hardware manufacturer. NVIDIA CEO and Founder Jensen (Jen-Hsun) Huang has found himself at the forefront of AI hardware with the GH200 AI superchip, just as he did with crypto hardware, being that it just so happens that graphics cards are well suited to the processing requirements of both of the worlds last two technological booms.
What makes Rain AI different from NVIDIA?
Rain AI has a particular focus on the “Digital In-Memory Computing (D-IMC) paradigm,” which will optimize for inefficiencies in AI processing, data movement, and data storage.
Unlike “traditional In-Memory Computing designs, Rain AI's proprietary D-IMC cores are scalable to high-volume production and support training and inference. When combined with Rain AI’s propriety quantization algorithms, the accelerator maintains FP32 accuracy.”
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OpenAI purchase AI chips from Rain Neuromorphics
In 2022, Rain AI raised $25 million USD to begin building chips that will accelerate all of the world’s AI efforts. Just one year later, Reuters reports that the Biden Administration has forced “a Saudi Aramco-backed venture capital firm” called Prosperity7, the lead investor in the aforementioned round, to sell its shares in Rain AI. Concurrently, OpenAI is investing in $51 million USD worth fo AI chips to help advance its artificial intelligence portfolio. This portfolio currently includes the world’s #1 text-to-text AI chatbot (ChatGPT), a top 3 text-to-image AI (DALL-E 3), and various audio-based AI models.
The US Treasury, which oversees the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) has commented that “CFIUS is committed to taking all necessary actions within its authority to safeguard U.S. national security. Consistent with law and practice, CFIUS does not publicly comment on transactions that it may or may not be reviewing.”
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