Introducing Microsoft 'Singularity' AI Infrastructure Service
Michael Spencer
A.I. Writer, researcher and curator - full-time Newsletter publication manager.
Microsoft is reviving the Singularity OS, this time as an A.I. Infrastructure
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What is Microsoft Singularity - Then and Now?
Microsoft's Azure and Research teams are working together on the 'Singularity' AI infrastructure service. You might remember?back in 2003, Singularity was?billed as an experimental “OS” of the future.
It was an operating system kernel concept called "Singularity" intended as a showcase for some cutting-edge computer science.
Around 20 years later, Microsoft's Azure and Research teams are working together to build a new AI infrastructure service, codenamed "Singularity."
The Singularity team is working to build what Microsoft describes in some of its job postings for the group as "a new AI?platform service ground-up from scratch that will become a major driver for AI, both inside Microsoft and outside."
An Operating System for Computer Science Research
The software isn't the next version of Windows or a reheated DOS. It's a prototype of an operating system intended for computer science research that Microsoft said demonstrates the possibilities for software that is more dependable and secure than contemporary OSes (yes, that includes Windows).
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.07848.pdf
A group of those working on the project have published a paper entitled?"Singularity: Planet-Scale, Preemptible and Elastic Scheduling of AI Workloads,"?which provides technical details about the Singularity effort.
Singularity is often a term related to the pursuit of AGI.
Prototype for A.I. Scalability
Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, said in a statement. "Think of it like a concept car. It is a prototype operating system designed from the ground up to test-drive a new paradigm for how operating systems and applications interact with one another. We are making it available to the community in the hope that it will enable researchers to try out new ideas quickly."
Always generous, Microsoft has?made a research development kit available for free download?from its CodePlex Web site.
Driving Digital Transformation in A.I. Ecosystems
The Singularity service is about providing data scientists and AI practitioners with a way to build, scale, experiment and iterate on their models on a Microsoft-provided distributed infrastructure service built specifically for AI.
In 2021 and 2022 Microsoft Research has been hitting A.I. research a lot harder I’ve noticed. It wants to stimulate and collaborate on interesting research and projects.
The RDK includes source code, build tools, test suites, design notes, and other background materials. Microsoft says the software, governed by a special Microsoft Research license, can be used for noncommercial, academic projects only.
In 2018, Microsoft went public about its "Project Brainwave" work which was designed to provide fast AI processing in Azure." This appears to be somewhat related to that.
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Singularity A.I. is a Major Project by Microsoft Research
Microsoft said Singularity has been in development for more than five years. "More than 40 Microsoft Research researchers and interns have collaborated on the project, which incorporated their ideas on security, programming languages, tools, and operating systems--and accelerated their own research," according to a Microsoft Research?post describing the project.
Analysts are speculating that Singularity is the next phase in turning Brainwave into a commercially available service.
Microsoft wants to be in the driver’s seat and involved in the conversations about cutting-edge computer science. When it bought GitHub and made a Supercomputer for OpenAI, this much was obvious.
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.?So far on AiSupremacy, I’ve covered Microsoft Research and Microsoft A.I. initiatives pretty well.
领英推荐
A.I. Research for Microsoft Azure
This is also about Microsoft scaling Azure AI-as-a-Service to compete against AWS, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud. 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.
So Microsoft wants to create and own a social graph related to the top A.I. Research occuring in the world. It wants even to provide the tools to have access to the best data on all of this.
Microsoft also makes various accelerators and services available under its "Azure AI" banner to customers who don't need a dedicated supercomputer.
How do you describe such a project?
"At the heart of Singularity is a novel, workload-aware scheduler that can transparently preempt and elastically scale deep learning workloads to drive high utilization without impacting their correctness or performance, across a global fleet of accelerators (e.g., GPUs, FPGAs)."
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Microsoft Singularity - The Sequel
In layman terms! Authors listed on the newly published paper include Azure Chief Technical Officer Mark Russinovich; Partner Architect Rimma Nehme, who?worked on Azure Cosmos DB?until moving to Azure to work on AI and deep learning in 2019; and Technical Fellow Dharma Shukla.
I could not even find YouTube videos related to this.
Microsoft watchers may recall that Microsoft previously used the Singularity codename for another Microsoft Research project.
Microsoft clearly is quite infatuated with ideas around AGI and trying to leverage the pursuit of that AI-arms race and holy grail. Microsoft would not be a poor custodian of such a thing since it has among the best cybersecurity on the planet.
Will the end-game of Microsoft might up being some planetary consciousness AI that looks after humanity, always seemly on the verge of self-annihilation? That would be the ultimate irony, wouldn’t it.
Microsoft’s Singularity projects have always been bordering on a proof-of-concept for the future of A.I. Scalability. I have no affiliation with Microsoft Research but I am pretty curious about the space.
The reality is Microsoft might be the one company most uniquely positioned at the intersection of A.I. and the Metaverse?(in the spirit of digital transformation). Certainly ByteDance, Google, Baidu and Meta are also in the running.
Microsoft understands that by collaborating with the top Universities in the world in research, it’s keeping tabs on the best projects and brightest minds that could impact how A.I. scales over the next few decades. It’s a pretty smart strategy.
It’s hard to say exactly what will come out of Microsoft’s 'Singularity' AI infrastructure service. Hopefully it’s more than just an Azure gimmick. As bullish I am about Ai-as-a-Service I want to see that as not just a product feature of Cloud computing monopolies.
We can revisit this topic once we know more and have more details of the possible synergies of this project with the real-world and Microsoft’s sprawling ecosystem that engages in bleeding edge A.I. Research.
Here is what a?job description?for Singularity looks like.
Wow Microsoft don’t move fast and break things. Let’s take care with the Singularity.
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EIC Apple Series; Management professor Institute Affiliate Prof. AI Berlin, MIR, &Singularity University Hub
3 年Wow, having joined the singularity Hub and one-time interview for officially joining the Singularity team several years before, I find this very exciting. What I wrote on multiagent AI VR past decade is relevant for a why ′not, multiagent OS and Metaverse to say the least, while my past CS life expertise was academic OS professor on my curricula. Anyway here is our new glimpse on a visual NMN predictive computing on a chapter. What can do for Singularity, Microsoft, or Meataverse. While this was no bridge to Babalon since 2004 a basis to an IM computing science with multiagent event processing foundations were developed in https://www.amazon.de/Intelligent-Multimedia-Computing-Science-Interfaces/dp/1588830373 A cool kid from the initial compting foundations ca?'t be on the Meta sugar mountain paid for how we got here somehow anymore? !! https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.1201/9781003180487/artificial-intelligence-computing-logic-cyrus-nourani
Interesting article ??
A.I. Writer, researcher and curator - full-time Newsletter publication manager.
3 年LinkedIn Any particular reason you double sent this post?
A.I. Writer, researcher and curator - full-time Newsletter publication manager.
3 年Kind of crazy that the job listing is in Beijing, China.
A.I. Writer, researcher and curator - full-time Newsletter publication manager.
3 年After GitHub and OpenAI Microsoft I think is just getting started with A.I.'s intersection with coding and cutting edge research.