GPU
A GPU, which stands for Graphics Processing Unit, is basically a turbocharged calculator. GPUs were originally designed to smooth out fancy graphics in video games, and now they’re the muscle cars of computing. The chips have lots of tiny cores, or networks of circuits and transistors, that tackle math problems together, called parallel processing. Since that’s basically what AI is — solving tons of calculations at massive scale to be able to communicate in human language and recognize images or sounds — GPUs are indispensable for AI tools for both training and inference. In fact, today’s most advanced models are trained using enormous clusters of interconnected GPUs — sometimes numbering tens of thousands spread across giant data centers — like those Microsoft has in Azure, which are among the most powerful computers ever built.
