AWS isn’t really happy about losing out to new entrants in the market, so it’s considering additional options. “We are thinking about different short-term and long-term solutions to deliver the experience our customers are looking for,” Kapoor says, declining to elaborate.
Shortages among cloud providers are impacting their customers, which include big names in technology. Social media platform Pinterest is expanding its use of AI to better serve users and advertisers, according to chief technology officer Jeremy King. The company plans to use Amazon’s new chips. “We need more GPUs, like everyone else,” King says. “The chip shortage is a reality.”
OpenAI, which develops ChatGPT and licenses the underlying technology to other companies, relies heavily on Azure’s chips to provide its services. GPU shortages have forced OpenAI to set usage limits for the tools it sells. This has been unfortunate for customers, like the company behind AI assistant Jamie, which summarizes meeting audio using OpenAI technology. Jamie delayed his public launch plan by at least five months, partly because he wanted to perfect his system, but also because of usage limitations, explains Louis Morgner, co-founder of the startup. The problem has not gone away. “We only have a few weeks left before going public and then we will have to closely monitor the scalability of our system, given the limitations of our service providers,” says Morgner.
“The industry is seeing strong demand for GPUs,” said Niko Felix, OpenAI spokesperson. “We continue to work to ensure our API customers have the capacity to meet their needs.”
At this point, any connection that can give a startup access to computing power is vital. Investors, friends, neighbors: Startup leaders rely on a wide variety of relationships to gain more AI firepower. Astria, for example, secured additional capacity at AWS with the help of Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI, which is a close partner of AWS and whose technology Astria relies on.
Accounting startup Pilot, which uses OpenAI technology for some mundane data sorting, gained early access to GPT-4 after enlisting help from university friends, employees and venture capitalists with links with OpenAI. It’s unclear whether these connections hastened Pilot’s release from a waitlist, but he now spends about $1,000 a month on OpenAI, and these connections could come in handy when he needs to increase his quota, CEO Waseem Daher said. “If you don’t take advantage of it [generative AI technology]someone else will do it, and it’s powerful enough that you don’t want to take that risk,” says Daher. “You want to provide the best results for your clients and stay up to date with what’s happening in the industry. »
