Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Despite Tesla CEO Elon Musk signing an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on advanced artificial intelligence research, Tesla secretly promoted a new generative artificial intelligence (AIGC) project on Twitter and purchased tens of thousands of GPUs (graphics processors) for this purpose, according to two people familiar with the matter.

According to foreign media quoted people familiar with the matter, Musk has made major reforms to the social media platform since completing the Twitter acquisition in October last year. Recently, he bought about 10,000 graphics processors for Twitter. Given the amount of computational effort required by new technologies, tech companies often use GPUs to process large AI model data.

Musk's AI project is still in its early stages, although his purchase of so much extra computing power suggests he has high expectations for the project, according to people familiar with the matter. Musk, however, has previously criticized recent developments in AIGC technology, saying the technology is so powerful that it needs regulation to ensure it operates in a way that is in the "public interest."

According to a person familiar with the matter, Musk's AI project on Twitter involves a large language model (LLM). LLM is still essentially an artificial intelligence that needs to be trained on large amounts of data in order to eventually create new, seemingly fairly complex content and text on its own. Twitter has tons of data to train these AI models. For example, OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, previously had access to Twitter data for training purposes, although Musk said he blocked that practice in December.

Musk also found new AI talent for Twitter. As of early March, he had officially hired engineers Igor Babuschkin and Manuel Kroiss from DeepMind, an AI research subsidiary of Alphabet. Since at least February, Musk has been in contact with people in the AI field, including Babushkin, hoping to start his own AI project to compete with ChatGPT.

People familiar with the matter said it was unclear what Twitter would do with AIGC. One use might be to improve search, which Musk has complained about. He even hired security developer George Hotz to advance a three-month project to "fix" the search feature. However, Holtz left after only one month.

Another possible use for Twitter AIGC is advertising, which is the biggest pillar of social media platform revenue, according to people familiar with the matter. Since Musk took over and changed many of its policies, Twitter has struggled to attract advertisers. After training, AIGC has the ability to create new advertising images and text to target specific audiences.

Currently, GPU prices can be very expensive. Nvidia, which has an estimated 95 percent market share, makes GPUs for large-scale AI models for $10,000 (currently about 68,800 yuan). Musk has repeatedly said Twitter's financial base isn't stable enough, but he likely spent tens of millions of dollars to add so many new GPUs, people familiar with the matter said.

The new project is expected to operate from one of Twitter's two remaining data centers, most likely the one in Atlanta, the person added. Another data center is located in Oregon. Previously, Twitter's main data center was located in Sacramento and operated by NTT, but Musk finally decided to shut it down suddenly in late December. Behnam Rezaei, Twitter's head of engineering, also resigned.

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