The hope was that researchers could change the equation with new kinds of computer chips—chips that could drive this research to levels beyond both Nvidia’s GPUs and Google’s TPUs. Dozens of companies, including Google, Nvidia, and Intel, as well as a long line of start-ups, were building new chips just for training neural networks, so that systems built by labs like DeepMind and Open AI could learn far more in far less time. “I look at what is coming in terms of new computing resources, and I plot this in relation to current results, and the curve keeps going up,” Altman says.
