Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Compute power. AMD is making all the right moves to capitalize on the AI revolution, announcing a blazing fast AI chip Thursday that it says will compete with Nvidia’s state-of-the-art Blackwell architecture. AMD is also going after Intel with its data center CPUs.

➘ BREAK THINGS: Absolute power. “Threads moderation failures,” is trending on (of all places) Threads, as complaints rise that the social media platform is aggressively (and improperly) deleting and restricting accounts.

Earlier this week, I spoke with Zoom Chief Technology Officer Xuedong Huang, a speech recognition pioneer who joined the company last year after 30 years at Microsoft.

I didn’t understand why he would leave Microsoft right when it was starting the most interesting and important chapter in that company’s history. Unlike big tech companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google, Zoom isn’t trying to be everything to everyone. And because of that, it’s less of a walled garden.

Walled gardens reduce the effectiveness of AI, because users have to switch between different platforms, rather than asking a single AI interface to do it for them. Zoom, though, can access and read your multiple email inboxes and calendars, your documents, listen to your meetings and take notes for you. Zoom calls also offer some of the best unstructured data for AI models.

Eventually, Zoom could become an AI assistant that just happens to have a video conferencing tool, he explained. Zoom is just enough under the radar that it’s not a big threat to larger tech companies, and it’s just small enough that it can still innovate, despite being a public company.

I don’t know what the AI future looks like, but Zoom has a shot at building something pretty interesting.

Microsoft Azure CTO: US data centers will soon hit limits

THE SCOOP

The data centers that make generative AI products like ChatGPT possible will soon reach size limits, according to Microsoft Azure Chief Technology Officer Mark Russinovich, necessitating a new method of connecting multiple data centers together for future generations of the technology.

The most advanced AI models today need to be trained inside a single building where tens (and soon hundreds) of thousands of AI processors, such as Nvidia’s H100s, can be connected so they act as one computer.

But as Microsoft and its rivals compete to build the world’s most powerful AI models, several factors, including America’s aging energy grid, will create a de facto cap on the size of a single data center, which soon could consume multiple gigawatts of power, equivalent to hundreds of thousands of homes.

Microsoft has been working furiously to help add capacity to the grid, inking a deal to reopen the Three Mile Island Nuclear power plant, launching a $30 billion fund for AI infrastructure with BlackRock and inking a $10 billion deal with Brookfield for green energy, among other projects.

Overhauling the US’ energy infrastructure was a big part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which provided $3 billion in incentives for building out transmission lines, among other priorities. But companies like Microsoft can’t afford to wait around for more money from Washington, on top of the time it would take to deploy those funds.

Given their AI ambitions, a solution could be building data centers in multiple locations to avoid overloading any one region’s power grid. It would be technically challenging, but it may be necessary, Russinovich told Semafor.

“I think it’s inevitable, especially when you get to the kind of scale that these things are getting to,” he said. “In some cases, that might be the only feasible way to train them is to go across data centers, or even across regions,” he said.

Connecting data centers that are already pushing the limits of modern computer networking will be no small feat. Even linking two of them is a challenge, requiring fiber optic speeds that, until recently, were not possible over long distances. For this reason, Russinovich said it is likely the data centers would need to be near each other.

He wasn’t sure exactly when the effort would be required, but it would involve several Microsoft teams as well as OpenAI. It could be years before the effort is necessary. “I don’t think we’re too far away,” he said.

While every company in the world wants you to talk to its AI chatbot, the embattled smart speaker company Sonos has another idea: Keith.

After Sonos severely whiffed on its new app interface, customers took to Reddit to vent. But Sonos employee Keith Nieves, a social media manager tasked with monitoring the company’s subreddit (which it doesn’t control), was there to empathize with them — and win their trust.

After a blistering round of layoffs, Reddit users sent “thoughts and prayers” to KeithfromSonos on the r/Sonus subreddit, according to Rachel Karten, who interviewed him. One user declared “Keith for CEO,” while another credited Keith with keeping the entire company afloat — a reminder that a touch of humanity beats any AI model, at least for now.

The number of employees in Malaysia that TikTok is laying off as the online platform turns to AI for more of its content moderation. It’s part of a broader move to cut hundreds from its global workforce as the company faces intensifying regulatory pressures. Malaysia has demanded that social media firms, including TikTok, do more to police content on their apps, and is requiring them to apply for operating licenses by next year.

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