Microsoft Singularity Infrastructure Service Aims To Make AI More Accessible

For some time, Microsoft's Azure and Research teams have been hard at work on a new AI infrastructure service aimed at streamlining AI development and reducing errors. The hope is that the service, code-named Singularity, can help provide a global AI computing solution that can make the technology more accessible to a greater number of organizations, according to a Microsoft report, "Singularity: Planet-Scale, Preemptible and Elastic Scheduling of AI Workloads."

The Singularity platform service provides data scientists and AI practitioners with a way to build, scale, experiment, and implement their models on a Microsoft-provided distributed infrastructure service built specifically for AI. Microsoft executives have previously discussed plans to make Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology available to their customers in service form, including first steps taken as part of Project Brainwave, a previous initiative that would allow users to conduct inference with Microsoft’s Deep Learning resources.

The “big tech” veteran has made major investments in the field of AI, including $1 billion to OpenAI in 2019. It also plans to make large AI models and training optimization tools available through Azure AI services and GitHub.