On Tuesday, Silicon Valley startup d-Matrix said it is shipping its first AI chip, designed to deliver services such as chatbots and video generators. D-Matrix, which has raised over $160 million in funding to date, including from Microsoft’s venture capital arm, said early customers are testing sample chips, with full shipments expected to pick up next year.
With backing from tech-leading pioneers Microsoft, all eyes are on d-Matrix to see precisely what the company’s chip is capable of and how game-changing it could be for AI implementation and the marketplace.
The Santa Clara, California company did not name specific customers but said Super Micro Computer will sell servers that can hold d-Matrix chips. D-Matrix is the latest of Microsoft’s many extended efforts and forays into exploring the potential of AI.
Microsoft has been working across many fronts for several years to capitalize on the promise of AI. Founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975, Microsoft has been an influential and innovative voice within the tech-sphere for decades now, and their embracing of AI early served as a crucial point of legitimization of the tech. If Microsoft was interested in using the tech, that meant there could be something meaningful there, and many other companies (such as Google and Meta) took notice and followed suit.
AI at Microsoft
As representatives from Microsoft said at the time, “AI is one of the most transformative technologies of our time – it will unlock profound possibilities for people,manyciety. It’s our goal to democratize our breakthroughs in AI to help people and organizations be more productive and go on to solve the most pressing problems of our society. Microsoft is focused on ensuring AI’s benefits can be shared broadly and responsibly.”
They elaborated on Microsoft’s general plans regarding the implementation of AI, saying, “We’re making long-term investments in AI because we’re optimistic about its potential to help people, industry, and society. Through cutting-edge advancements from Microsoft Research, platform innovations with Azure, and products like Copilot that help people get more done, we’re committed to bringing technology and people together to responsibly realize AI’s promises.”
The Aim of d-Matrix
D-Matrix aims to complement AI chip giants such as Nvidia, whose chips train AI systems on huge amounts of data. Once the systems are trained, d-Matrix chips aim to handle vast numbers of requests from the systems’ end users in a step called inference. D-Matrix’s chip is specifically designed to handle requests from many users on a single chip, even as those users continue to ask the AI system for new responses or tweaks to a video they’ve asked the system to generate.
“We are getting a lot of interest in video use cases where we have customers coming and saying, ‘Hey, look, we want to generate videos, and we want a collection of users, all interacting with their own respective video,'” said Sid Sheth, d-Martix’s chief executive.
Microsoft believes that when you create technologies that can change the world, you must also ensure that the technology is used responsibly. To this end, the company has remained committed to designing responsible AI. Their AI work is guided by principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. These principles guide our research, engineering systems, and policy excellence.
Responsible AI
At Microsoft, responsible AI is not a filter applied at the end of development but a foundational part of the process. Employees are trained to assess risk, apply mitigations, and then work with a multidisciplinary team of researchers, engineers, and policy experts to review, test, and red-team. Advancing safe, secure, and trustworthy AI requires various approaches, including commitments from industry leaders, domestic policies and regulations, and global governance.
