Microsoft AI chief says AI limits still far off, computing power to jump 1,000-fold by 2028
Microsoft AI chief says AI limits still far off, computing power to jump 1,000-fold by 2028
Publish Date: 2026-04-09 01:46:00
Source Domain: www.digitaltoday.co.kr
Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI. [Photo: Wikimedia]
Mustafa Suleyman (무스타파 슐레이만), CEO of Microsoft’s AI group, said artificial intelligence development is unlikely to run into limits for the time being.
In an article contributed to MIT Technology Review on April 8 local time, Suleyman pointed to an explosive rise in computing power as a key driver of recent AI performance gains. He said repeated claims of a growth slowdown, from inside and outside the industry, have proven wrong.
He said the amount of computation used to train cutting-edge AI models has expanded since 2010 from 10 to the power of 14 flops to more than 10 to the power of 26. He argued the rise has been a key factor driving overall AI advances.
He also pushed back against claims that the slowing of Moore’s Law, a lack of data and power constraints explain the current improvement trend. Recent gains are the result of not only semiconductors but also simultaneous improvements in memory, networks and software efficiency, he said.
There have also been major changes on the hardware side. According to Suleyman, the raw performance of Nvidia chips rose about eightfold over six years, from 312 teraflops in 2020 to 2,500 teraflops recently. Microsoft’s in-house AI chip, Maia 200, was also introduced as delivering about a 30 percent improvement in performance per dollar versus the previous version. He said connectivity technologies such as HBM, NVLink and InfiniBand made it possible to tie hundreds of thousands of GPUs together as if they were a single system.
These infrastructure improvements have shortened training times. Suleyman said it took 167 minutes in 2020 to train a language model using 8 GPUs, but it has now fallen to under 4 minutes. He said performance improved by about 50 times, far exceeding the roughly fivefold improvement expected under Moore’s…
