I would guess that Singularity is the next phase in turning Brainwave into a commercially available service. I’ve asked Microsoft for a comment on that. I’ve also asked when and how Microsoft plans to turn Singularity into a commercially available service. I will update this post with any information I get back. In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI, and officials announced a year later that they had built the fifth most powerful publicly recorded supercomputer in collaboration with and exclusively for OpenAI. While the AI supercomputer Microsoft has built is exclusively for OpenAI, Microsoft officials have been saying they planned to make the company’s large AI models and training optimization tools available through Azure AI services and GitHub. Microsoft also makes various accelerators and services available under its “Azure AI” banner to customers who don’t need a dedicated supercomputer. In November 2021, Microsoft announced it was expanding its AI supercomputer lineup with 80GB NVIDIA A100 GPUs in Azure. Microsoft watchers may recall that Microsoft previously used the Singularity codename for another Microsoft Research project. That Singularity was a microkernel operating system and set of related tools and libraries developed completely in managed code. Singularity was not based on Windows; it was written from scratch as a proof-of-concept. Singularity ended up spawning and/or influencing several other operating system research projects at Microsoft, including Barrelfish, Helios, Midori, and Drawbridge. It’s also worth noting that Microsoft is hardly the only tech company looking at trying to make AI supercomputing capabilities available internally and to customers. Meta is doing the same, and, unsurprisingly, has positioned its work as the key to unlocking the metaverse.
