Phison president promises AI training and AI tuning with a $50K workstation system

Phison is promising that $1 million to $1.5 million AI workstations are a thing of the past, promising a new $50,000 workstation that's perfect for AI training and AI tuning.

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In a recent chat with CRN, Phison General Manager and President Michael Wu explained: "We've changed that $1 million or $1.5 million investment, the minimum requirement to have a fine-tuning machine to create ChatGPT, to $50,000. You no longer need three DGX GPUs anymore. You can do it with a single workstation with four workstation GPUs and with two of our aiDAPTIV+ SSDs that are treated as virtual memory for the GPU".

He continued: "Furthermore, when we demonstrated a 70-billion parameter machine at NVIDIA's GTC, people didn't know how to use it. Nobody has an AI engineer. So we created a software tool called aiDAPTIV+ Pro Suite that lets you go from putting a PDF of your proprietary document to the system to fine tune the 70-billion parameter model to building a chatbot like ChatGPT. We are taking advantage of all the big investment that Meta has made on the open source Llama 3 to create a custom AI for you".

• Read more: Phison PS5031-E31T: world's first DRAM-less Gen5 SSD controller, up to 10.8GB/sec
• Read more: MAINGEAR PRO AI workstation PC with Phison aiDaptiv+ platform: uses SSDs, DRAM to boost AI perf

The big change is being driven by Phison's in-house aiDAPTIVE+ Pro Suite, with the new system being a software upgrade for Phison's aiADAPTIVCache AI100 SSD that does everything required for on-premises data processing, training on very large language models (LLMs), and adds a chat interface to engage with the data, explained Michael Wu, general manager and president of the Miaoli, Taiwan-based company with U.S. headquarters in San Jose, California.

Phison's use of the aiDAPTIVE+P Pro suite sees the company creating a memory expansion virtual port to the GPU VRAM, explained Wu. He continued: "People thought it's not possible, but we did it. AI requires super high endurance and performance. But most importantly, it's not just the SSD. We actually created the driver that allows a host to look at a GPU card as if it has tons of memory for AI fine tuning and domain training".

You can read the full chat between the Phison GM and CRN here.