They do have such a dedicated chip, the MAIA 100 chip which is an in-house chip, and it is a chip that was designed in the era of transformers, and this is what is being discussed in the interview.
I missed that, it’s been a few years since I’ve paid attention to MS hardware and it is very possible that my thoughts are out of date. I left MS with a rather bad taste in my mouth. I’m checking out the info on that chip and what I am seeing is a little light on details. Just TPUs and fast interconnects.
What I’ve found; MIAI 200 the next version is having issues due to brain drain, and MIAI 300 is to be an entirely new architecture so the status for that is rather uncertain.
I think a big reason MS invested so heavily into OpenAI was to have a marquee customer push cultural change through the org, which was a necessary decision. If that eventually yields in a useful chip I will be impressed, I hope it does.
