Elon Musk’s xAI Colossus Powers Up

Elon Musk’s xAI unveiled Colossus, the most potent AI training system, with a 100k H100 cluster soon doubling in size, setting a new standard in AI competition.

The competition to develop the most potent artificial intelligence models is well known. The billionaire Elon Musk, the owner and billionaire of the social networking platform X, took the lead over the weekend.

Musk said on September 2 that his team has made the Colossus 100k H100 training cluster model available online at xAI, his own AI development and research organization.

Musk said it took his team 122 days to finish bringing Colossus online. In the coming months, it will grow to 200k (or 50k H200s) in size.

Musk’s Enormous prototype

These days, Colossus is hailed as the most potent AI training system on the market. The number of graphics processing units (GPUs) the model is powered by is the basis for this figure.

The scope of this advancement, which exceeds every significant model produced to date, was brought to light by one X user. In contrast, the most potent model from OpenAI requires 80,000 GPUs.

The world’s top producer of semiconductor chips, Nvidia, worked with developers to construct the model. One of the most sought-after semiconductors on the market is Nvidia’s H200, albeit it was recently eclipsed by the company’s most recent Blackwell chip, which was introduced in March 2024.

In contrast, the H200 has 4.8 TB/sec of bandwidth and 141 GB of HBM3E memory. The top-end capacity of Blackwell surpasses that of the H200 by 36.2% and has a total bandwidth of 66.7% more.

In a post, Nvidia congratulated Musk and the xAI team on the unveiling of Colossus. It further emphasized that it will have “exceptional gains” in energy efficiency and be the strongest.

Industry insiders have responded overwhelmingly on social media, describing this as a “huge” achievement in artificial intelligence.

The team received praise for their accomplishment from Cathie Wood, CEO of ARK Invest, who described it as “impressive” and hinted at “big announcements ahead.”

The Emergence of intelligence

Much speculation surfaced in April 2023 regarding Musk’s massive GPU purchases, with some reports claiming he was buying up to 10,000 graphics processing units to further his xAI projects.

Musk has been quite outspoken about his intentions to advance artificial intelligence. In addition to forming a collaboration with Oracle, he has ambitions to build a supercomputer that might be operational by the fall of 2025.

Musk has spearheaded the AI revolution and backed laws that advance safe AI.

Musk said on X on August 27 that he thought California should approve Senate Bill 1047. This is a contentious view in the tech sector because many fear it will impede AI innovation in the US.

He claimed to have supported artificial intelligence regulation for over 20 years, comparing it to laws governing “any product/technology that is a potential risk to the public.”

In response to legal actions in an Irish court involving the local Data Protection Commission, X agreed on August 9 to cease processing personal data for its users in the EU region.