(Bloomberg) — OpenAI said that its new Jalapeno chips performed better than Nvidia Corp.’s current lineup during testing, underscoring the company’s progress developing AI processors in-house.
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In the tests, the Jalapeno processor led in two categories: the amount of AI work it could handle per unit of power and its speed at returning responses. The semiconductor was measured against Nvidia’s GB300, which was the leading option on the public benchmarking system used in the test, OpenAI chip chief Richard Ho said in an interview.
The maker of ChatGPT plans to start using the new chips to support its artificial intelligence models later this year, part of a broader push to build its own AI infrastructure. It joins a stampede of companies working to develop homegrown AI chips — a field currently dominated by Nvidia.
OpenAI created Jalapeno in a partnership with Broadcom Inc., which makes custom chips for a variety of clients. The two companies, which announced their pact last year, touted the speed at which the processor was developed in June, saying it came together in record time.
Typically, some chips are more powerful at running AI tasks and others are better at fast responses, but Jalapeno offers both, Ho said. OpenAI will determine which of its AI models will run on Jalapeno, he said, allowing customers to benefit by selecting options that offer either cost savings or better performance.
“In the lab, Jalapeno is showing performance both in the high-throughput domain, meaning it will be able to serve a lot of customers more cheaply, as well as the low-latency domain, meaning that for the customers that care about it, the response time will be really, really fast,” Ho said.
Because the chip is achieving strong results at low voltage — 700 watts — Jalapeno will allow OpenAI to save money when running its data centers, where power is a key cost, he said.
Jalapeno wasn’t tested against the new generation of Nvidia chips, Vera Rubin, which just began shipping. It’s also not designed for training AI models, an area where Nvidia technology excels. Jalapeno is intended for the inference phase of AI — the stage when models have already been trained and can begin responding to prompts and handling tasks.
