Microsoft has already made it very clear, in recent times, its fervent interest in artificial intelligence. Their repeated investments in OpenAI were already a clear sign of this, and it was not necessary to be the most astute of the place to understand, already at that time, that the plans of those from Redmond went very directly to make use of the technology of said company. in its wide catalog of products and services. It was so logical that otherwise it would have been incomprehensible.
It didn’t take us long, since the last big investment, to see the first results of it. The most notorious has undoubtedly been the arrival of artificial intelligence at Bing, a very fast and intelligent move that has made Microsoft’s search engine a real threat to Google for the first time in its history. Just yesterday we told you that Samsung is considering adopting Bing as the default search engine for its devices, something that has not gone down well with Alphabet, for obvious reasons.
We have also learned of Redmond’s plans to bring artificial intelligence to Microsoft 365 with Copilot, although in this case the deployment is being much slower. And this is only the beginning, because we can bet that during the next months we will see many more movements in this senseeven more so given the great reception that the first implementations of this technology have had in its catalogue.
Artificial intelligence is, this is an important point, quite demanding when it comes to the infrastructure responsible for providing such services. NVIDIA has managed to position itself as the reference hardware manufacturer for this market, but we can expect new alternatives to emerge in this regard at some point. What we did not expect, although it actually makes a lot of sense, is that one of them was Microsoft, and that their plans also come from afar.
As we can read in The Information (behind the paywall), Microsoft is working on its own hardware for artificial intelligence. These plans have the internal name of Project Athena and, as I indicated before, it has not been a response to the AI boom this year, since they have been working on it since 2019. According to two sources cited by said medium, the project currently has with 300 workers.
The current team is working together with OpenAI staff, which can mean that they already have some working prototype, although it is also possible that they are working in the opposite direction, that is, optimizing the silicon design for solutions designed by OpenAI and by Microsoft engineers. Be that as it may, the sources they cite 2024 as a possible year of their arrivalwhich we can be clear that will occur, at least in the first instance, in the company’s data centers.
