Amazon has announced a $110 million investment for university-led research and education in generative AI.
The ‘Build with Trainium’ programme is to provide researchers at Berkeley University of California and Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania with the ability to build new machine learning libraries and AI architecture on AWS Tranium chips. AWS will give $11 million in Trainium credits to partner universities, as well as offering $500,000 in individual grants within AI research.
First launched in 2019, Trainium is the ML chip built by Amazon Web Services for deep learning training and inference. With the new Trainium2 chips designed to deliver faster training performance with a greater size of memory capacity, academics leveraging open-source ML libraries and Frameworks will have greater processing power than ever before.
By providing access to 40,000 Trainium chips in its powerful UltraCluster configuration, Amazon hopes this investment in academia will support new technological breakthroughs, as well as the practical training of future AI experts.
The development of new models and applications with AI demands computing power that many universities simply cannot offer due to financial constraints, particularly when looking to scale experimental projects. This strategic move from AWS is effectively ‘crowdsourcing’ the future of software development and placing themselves at the heart of open-source AI innovation.
Gadi Hutt, Director of Product and Customer Engineering at AWS chip manufacturer Annapurna Labs, said:
“AI academic research today is severely bottlenecked by a lack of resources and, as such, the academic sector is falling behind quickly. With Build on Trainium, AWS is investing in a new wave of AI research guided by leading AI research in universities that will advance the state of generative AI applications, libraries, and optimizations. There is no contractual lock that makes universities exclusive technology partners. What we ask in return is that the outcomes of the research will be open sourced for the benefit of the community.”
Read the full announcement from AWS here.