Harvard Considers Investing $25 Million to Increase AI Computing Capacity
“A University spokesperson declined to comment on the size or scope of the computing investment.”
How can this be? Progressives keep telling us that AI is going to kill us all and must be stopped.
The Harvard Crimson reports:
Harvard Weighs $25 Million Investment to Double University-Wide AI Computing Capacity
Harvard is considering putting roughly $25 million from a new centrally administered fund toward computing infrastructure to significantly boost the University’s computing capacity, according to two people familiar with the planning.
The money is penciled in to purchase a cluster of GPUs roughly the same size as the existing cluster at the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence, according to Bernardo L. Sabatini ’91, who co-directs the institute. Sabatini estimated the investment could roughly double the University’s AI computing capacity.
While the Kempner cluster — roughly 1,100 GPUs — prioritizes access for its own affiliates through a tiered system, the new GPUs would be “a University resource for all,” Sabatini wrote. Decisions about which GPUs to purchase and how they are used would be made centrally rather than by Kempner, he added.
A second person, granted anonymity to discuss plans that are not public, confirmed a similar figure had been discussed. Both Sabatini and the person said the number was not finalized but had circulated in recent talks about how the University plans to allocate a recently announced $50 million investment in cutting-edge scientific research.
A University spokesperson declined to comment on the size or scope of the computing investment. The spokesperson referred The Crimson to a Sept. 28 announcement in the Harvard Gazette that said the money would support servers, computational capacity, cloud computing, and leading AI models.
The $50 million fund is the centrally administered portion of a $150 million research initiative by Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 announced last week, with the remaining $100 million to be distributed by Harvard’s schools. The $50 million fund will support research in areas including neuroscience, immunology, energy and climate, and industry-oriented research, as well as computing infrastructure. The University has not publicly detailed how that money will be divided.
“Half of it is compute — is going to go to computing,” Sabatini said of the $50 million pot. “I don’t know that that’s a firm number, but that’s what I’ve heard bandying about.”
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Comments
In Harvard’s case, we can refer to it as “prosthetic intelligence.”