OpenAI launches Jalapeño: why does the future of artificial intelligence lie in chips?
The aim is to reduce costs, energy consumption and dependence on Nvidia. Like Google, Microsoft and Amazon, OpenAI is also aiming to take control of its hardware
OpenAI has officially joined Silicon Valley’s most exclusive club: that of companies which no longer confine themselves to writing software, but also design the hardware on which that software runs.
The new chip is called Jalapeño, and its mission is to reduce the cost of artificial intelligence and increase the available computing power. The announcement came from OpenAI in partnership with Broadcom, the semiconductor giant which, over the last two years, has become one of the key players in the AI economy. In essence, Jalapeño is OpenAI’s first proprietary chip, built specifically for a very precise function: inference.
What is inference?
Translated from technical jargon: it’s not for training models, but for making them work. It’s the difference between building a brain and using it. Training is the phase in which a model consumes vast amounts of data and computational power in order to learn. Inference, on the other hand, is what happens every time a user types a question into ChatGPT, asks Codex to generate code, or activates an AI agent.
The problem: AI is too expensive
That is why inference has become fundamental in the new economy of intelligent agents. Over the last two years, the bottleneck in artificial intelligence has been hardware – or, more precisely, the costs involved in providing sufficient computing power to run neural networks. Servers are expensive, electricity is expensive, and the process needs to be managed. OpenAI, like almost everyone else, has grown by relying on Microsoft’s infrastructure and Nvidia chips. But there is a structural problem: the more ChatGPT grows, the higher the computational costs become. This is why OpenAI has chosen to move towards a ‘full-stack’ model: controlling not only the models and products, but also the underlying hardware. Jalapeño was born out of this strategy.
