compute

$200M in Compute Fuels Up-and-Coming AI Startups at AI2 Incubator

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AI2 Incubator, spun out of the Allen Institute for AI in 2022, has secured a windfall $200 million in compute that startups going through its program can take advantage of to accelerate early development. “Our community of hundreds of AI practitioners are desperate for compute,” said managing director Jacob Colker. A million dollars of dedicated compute goes a long way for pre-seed startups, which is where AI2 focuses (we’ve covered WellSaid Labs, Xnor.ai, and others from their program). Colker suggested it would cover most compute needs even for companies developing new foundation models. They’ve helped build more than 30 startups and last year raised a $30 million fund to continue the work.

“NodeShift Takes on Hyperscalers with Revolutionary Decentralized Cloud Solution”

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When the large cloud providers have excess compute capacity, they tend to discount it through programs like AWS’s and Azure’s spot instances. While in the recovery room, Surkov shared his idea for a company that would make this excess data center capacity available to developers. Because of his experience with networking at Cisco and decentralized systems in crypto, Surkov had become interested in why there is so much friction in using decentralized compute. In addition to these decentralized projects, NodeShift has also set up deals with independent data center operators. Just on the data center side, the company says, it currently has access to about 400,000 CPUs and 28 million terabytes of storage.