Dell Technologies (NYSE: DELL) and Imbue, an independent AI research company, have entered into a $150 million agreement to build a new high-performance computing cluster for training foundation models optimized for reasoning. 

Imbue is one of the few independent AI labs that develops its own foundation models, and trains them to have more advanced reasoning capabilities — like knowing when to ask for more information, analyzing and critiquing their own outputs, or breaking down a difficult goal into a plan and then executing on it. Imbue trains AI agents on top of those models that can do work for people across diverse fields in ways that are robust, safe, and useful. Imbue’s goal is to create practical tools for building agents that could enable workers across a broad set of domains, including helping engineers write new code, analysts understand and draft complex policy proposals, and much more.

“The purpose of technology is to drive human progress, and this often begins at the research level,” said Jeff Boudreau, chief AI officer at Dell Technologies. “Dell technology will provide Imbue with the powerful engine to help unearth the next generation of impactful AI innovation.”

Imbue is already using the cluster – powered by Dell PowerEdge XE9680 servers with NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs – to train AI models and develop early prototype agents that can correct bugs in code and analyze lengthy documents. Longer term, the company is designing more capable, trustworthy AI agents that don't require constant supervision from their users, opening the door to a future where, for example, agents can plan a vacation on their users’ behalf, not simply generate travel ideas, freeing people up to spend their downtime however they’d like.

Imbue and Dell designed the system to include smaller clusters to support rapid experimentation on novel model architectures as well as rapid networking into a large cluster, to enable the efficient training of large-scale foundation models.

“Building a new generation of foundation models requires the very best IT infrastructure, and Dell Technologies has helped us deploy a custom cluster much more quickly than other providers could have,” said Josh Albrecht, chief technology officer of Imbue. “Dell has been an invaluable collaborator as we pursue our work to create AI systems with much stronger reasoning abilities.”

Built for extreme acceleration for AI, machine learning and deep learning training, the Dell systems are equipped to deploy AI computing initiatives with high GPU memory, bandwidth and security. The PowerEdge servers’ Smart Cooling features sustain great performance more efficiently while reducing the data center’s overall carbon footprint.

Imbue’s system is managed by Voltage Park, a cloud compute provider that builds solutions for machine learning.

Copyright © 2023 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. All Rights Reserved. Dell Technologies and Dell are trademarks of Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries.