Elon Musk Buys Ten Thousand GPUs for Secretive AI Project

It's a big gamble.

10,000 GPUs

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has bought around 10,000 graphics cards and is hiring AI experts to build a ChatGPT competitor within Twitter, Insider reports.

That's despite the billionaire CEO repeatedly voicing concerns over AI chatbots like ChatGPT, and even signing an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on developing AIs more advanced than OpenAI's GPT-4.

Training a large language model like OpenAI's highly popular AI chatbot takes a lot of computational power, which means Musk had to dig deep in his sizeable pockets — tens of millions of dollars, according to Insider — to finance the project.

Big Gamble

It's a big gamble considering that Twitter's finances are already in a rough state. Last month, Musk warned workers in an email that the site was in a precarious financial position, valuing it at less than half of what he bought it for last year.

Needless to say, buying a warehouse full of expensive AI hardware is likely to only add to Twitter's growing mountain of debt, at least in the short term.

Earlier this year, Twitter also hired several AI researchers and engineers from DeepMind, a UK-based AI research lab and Alphabet subsidiary.

Catching Up

Whether Twitter will see success in developing its own AI tool remains to be seen. According to Insider, such a tool could enhance the company's search functionality or build out its advertising business.

As always, Musk's intentions are as murky as ever. Is the billionaire trying to one-up OpenAI, a company he co-founded, but has had a very shaky relationship with over the last couple of years?

The stakes are high, even for Musk. Going on a major shopping spree while the online platform is in a rough state is a bold move that could end up backfiring on him.

Besides, Twitter has a lot of catching up to do, considering the AI race is already well underway.

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