Twitter has reportedly invested in hardware upgrades for its North American datacenter operation, purchasing around 10,000 GPUs for its two remaining datacenter locations. According to insider sources, Elon Musk has committed to a large language model (LLM) project to rival OpenAI's ChatGPT system. While the GPUs won't provide much computational value for Twitter's day-to-day tasks, the extra processing power will be utilized for deep learning purposes.
Twitter has not revealed any concrete plans for its in-house artificial intelligence project, but earlier this year, Musk recruited several research personnel from Alphabet's DeepMind division, leading to speculation that he was incubating a resident AI research lab. The leak of information has not pointed to an exact GPU type, specification, or manufacturer, but the datacenter-grade cards are speculated to boost Twitter's search functionality via generative AI. The platform's advertising arm is another area of interest for AI-assisted systems, with automation of user-targeted material being a distinct possibility.
Industry experts have been left puzzled by this sudden upshift in Twitter's AI operations, given Musk's highly publicized criticisms of the AI industry as a whole. He has called for a six-month pause on experiments, leading to accusations of hypocrisy, self-interest, and inconsistencies.
