Microsoft is updating its startup program to include a free Azure AI infrastructure option for high-end GPU virtual machine clusters, for use in training and running large language models and other deep learning models.
Y Combinator (YC) and its community of startup innovators will be the first to access this offering in private preview to a limited cohort. YC has an unmatched reputation as a pioneering startup accelerator helping launch transformative companies including Airbnb, Coinbase and Stripe. Now YC startups will have the technical resources they need to quickly prototype and bring to market cutting-edge AI innovations. Our close collaboration with YC provides valuable insights into the infrastructure needs of early-stage AI companies, ensuring our offering delivers optimal value to additional startups going forward.
“With the overwhelming infrastructure requirements needed to do AI at scale, we believe that providing startups with high-performance capabilities tailored for demanding AI workloads will empower our startups to ship faster,” said Michael Seibel, Managing Director of Y Combinator.
We are also working with M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, and the startups in M12’s portfolio which will gain access to these dedicated supercomputing resources to further empower their AI innovations. Over time, our vision is to partner with additional startup investors and accelerators, with a goal of working with the ecosystem to lower the barrier to training and running AI models for any promising startup.
Microsoft Azure offers cloud-based scalable AI infrastructure, built for and with the world’s most sophisticated AI workloads, from delivering the largest and most complex AI models including GPT-4 and ChatGPT through Azure OpenAI Service to developers to infuse AI capabilities into many apps. Azure AI infrastructure is fueling groundbreaking innovations. Infrastructure requirements to do AI at scale are often overwhelming, but with Azure’s global infrastructure of AI-accelerated server offerings with networked graphics processing units (GPUs), startups building advanced AI systems will be able to leverage these high-performance capabilities to accelerate innovation.
On top of world-class infrastructure, we will also provide tools to simplify deployment and management through Azure Machine Learning. This enables easy low-code or code-based training of custom models and fine-tuning of frontier and open-source models, simplified deployment and optimizations like Low Rank Adaptation, DeepSpeed and ONNX Runtime (ORT). Further, startups can deploy AI solutions with peace of mind knowing all deployments are secure and backed by Microsoft’s principles for Responsible AI.
