GPU
Also called graphics processing unit, GPUs
The chip that does AI's heavy maths. Built for video games, it now fills data centres and is the main cost of running AI.
A graphics processing unit was designed to draw video-game scenes, which means doing thousands of small calculations at the same time. Neural networks turn out to need exactly that: almost all of their work is multiplying long lists of numbers. So the chips built for games became the engines of modern AI.
Training a frontier model takes many thousands of GPUs running for months. Then every question anyone asks runs on GPUs too. That's why AI companies spend so heavily on data centres, and why electricity matters: the International Energy Agency put data centres at about 1.5% of the world's electricity in 2024 and expects their use to roughly double by 2030.
For example
Generating a short video uses far more GPU time than answering a text question, which is why video features come with much tighter limits.
Put it to use
Where you'll meet GPU in ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, how to use it there, and the mix-up most people make.
Daily Bytes Plus is in the Android app.