Rebellions Inc., a South Korean startup, unveiled an artificial intelligence (AI) chip as it competed for government contracts and Seoul sought a role for homegrown firms in the burgeoning AI sector.
The firm's ATOM chip is the most recent attempt by Korea to compete with Nvidia Corp., the market leader in the hardware that drives the potentially ground-breaking AI technology.
ChatGPT, a chatbot from Microsoft-backed OpenAI that generates articles, essays, jokes, and even poetry, is the fastest-growing consumer app in history, making AI the talk of the tech industry.
As per the Mark Lipacis of Jefferies, a semiconductor analyst, Nvidia, a U.S. chip designer, accounted for around 86% of the computing power of the six largest cloud services in the world as of December.
By investing more than $800 million in research and development over the next five years, the South Korean government hopes to build a homegrown sector and increase the market share of Korean AI chips in domestic data centres from basically zero to 80% by 2030.
"It’s hard to catch up to Nvidia, which is so far ahead in general-purpose AI chips," said Kim Yang-Paeng, senior researcher at the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade. "But it's not set in stone because AI chips can carry out different functions and there aren't set boundaries or metrics."
The ATOM from Rebellions is made to be extremely effective at running chatbot and machine vision applications. According to Park Sunghyun, co-founder and CEO of Rebellions, the chip uses just around 20% of the power of an Nvidia A100 processor on certain operations since it focuses on a narrow range of jobs rather than performing a large variety of them.
The most well-liked chip for AI workloads is the A100, which is potent enough to "train" (or, in business parlance, "build") the AI models. ATOM, created by Rebellions and produced by Samsung Electronics Co. in Korea, does not provide training.
While Taiwan, China, France, Germany, the United States, and other nations have comprehensive plans to help their semiconductor industries, the South Korean government is unusual in focusing its efforts on AI chips.
Only local chipmakers will be permitted to submit bids for two data centres, also known as neural processing unit farms, that Seoul will advertise for this month.