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Furiosa: 3.5x efficiency over H100s

furiosa.ai

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Re: Furiosa: 3.5x efficiency over H100s

#12
post #7

I am of the opinion that Nvidia's hit the wall with their current architecture in the same way that Intel has historically with its various architectures - their current generation's power and cooling requirements are requiring the construction of entirely new datacenters with different architectures, which is going to blow out the economics on inference (GPU + datacenter + power plant + nuclear fusion research divis…

> nothing about the industry's finances add up right now

Nothing about the industry’s finances, or about Anthropic and OpenAI’s finances?

I look at the list of providers on OpenRouter for open models, and I don’t believe all of them are losing money. FWIW Anthropic claims (iirc) that they don’t lose money on inference. So I don’t think the industry or the model of selling inference is what’s in trouble there.

I am much more skeptical of Anthropic and OpenAI’s business model of spending gigantic sums on generating proprietary models. Latest Claude and GPT are very very good, but not better enough than the competition to justify the cash spend. It feels unlikely that anyone is gonna “winner takes all” the market at this point. I don’t see how Anthropic or OpenAI’s business model survive as independent entities, or how current owners don’t take a gigantic haircut, other than by Sam Altman managing to do something insane like reverse acquiring Oracle.

EDIT: also feels like Musk has shown how shallow the moat is. With enough cash and access to exceptional engineers, you can magic a frontier model out of the ether, however much of a douche you are.

Re: Furiosa: 3.5x efficiency over H100s

#14

How usable is this in practice for the average non AI organization? Are you locked into a niche ecosystem that limits the options of what models you can serve?

Yes, but in principle it isn't that different from running on Trainium or Inferentia (it's a matter of degree), and plenty of non-AI organizations adopted Trainium/Inferentia.

Re: Furiosa: 3.5x efficiency over H100s

#15
post #7

I am of the opinion that Nvidia's hit the wall with their current architecture in the same way that Intel has historically with its various architectures - their current generation's power and cooling requirements are requiring the construction of entirely new datacenters with different architectures, which is going to blow out the economics on inference (GPU + datacenter + power plant + nuclear fusion research divis…

You’re right but Nvidia enjoys an important advantage Intel had always used to mask their sloppy design work: the supply chain. You simply can’t source HBMs at scale because Nvidia bought everything, TSMC N3 is likewise fully booked and between Apple and Nvidia their 18A is probably already far gone and if you want to connect your artisanal inference hardware together then congratulations, Nvidia is the leader here too and you WILL buy their switches.

As for the business side, I’ve yet to hear of a transformative business outcome due to LLMs (it will come, but not there yet). It’s only the guys selling the shovels that are making money.

This entire market runs on sovereign funds and cyclical investing. It’s crazy.

Re: Furiosa: 3.5x efficiency over H100s

#16
post #7

I am of the opinion that Nvidia's hit the wall with their current architecture in the same way that Intel has historically with its various architectures - their current generation's power and cooling requirements are requiring the construction of entirely new datacenters with different architectures, which is going to blow out the economics on inference (GPU + datacenter + power plant + nuclear fusion research divis…

> The reason this matters is that LLMs are incredibly nifty often useful tools that are not AGI and also seem to be hitting a scaling wall

I don't know who needs to hear this, but the real break through in AI that we have had is not LLMs, but generative AI. LLM is but one specific case. Furthermore, we have hit absolutely no walls. Go download a model from Jan 2024, another from Jan 2025 and one from this year and compare. The difference is exponential in how well they have gotten.

Re: Furiosa: 3.5x efficiency over H100s

#17
post #7

I am of the opinion that Nvidia's hit the wall with their current architecture in the same way that Intel has historically with its various architectures - their current generation's power and cooling requirements are requiring the construction of entirely new datacenters with different architectures, which is going to blow out the economics on inference (GPU + datacenter + power plant + nuclear fusion research divis…

> I am of the opinion that Nvidia's hit the wall with their current architecture

Not likely since TSMC has a new process with big gains.

> The story with Intel

Was that their fab couldn’t keep up not designs.

Re: Furiosa: 3.5x efficiency over H100s

#18
post #7

I am of the opinion that Nvidia's hit the wall with their current architecture in the same way that Intel has historically with its various architectures - their current generation's power and cooling requirements are requiring the construction of entirely new datacenters with different architectures, which is going to blow out the economics on inference (GPU + datacenter + power plant + nuclear fusion research divis…

> I am of the opinion that Nvidia's hit the wall with their current architecture

Based on what?

Their measured performance on things people care about keep going up, and their software stack keeps getting better and unlocking more performance on existing hardware

Inference tests: https://inferencemax.semianalysis.com/

Training tests: https://www.lightly.ai/blog/nvidia-b200-vs-h100

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/mi300x-vs-h100-vs-h200... (only H100, but vs AMD)

> but nothing about the industry's finances add up right now

Is that based just on the HN "it is lots of money so it can't possibly make sense" wisdom? Because the released numbers seem to indicate that inference providers and Anthropic are doing pretty well, and that OpenAI is really only losing money on inference because of the free ChatGPT usage.

Further, I'm sure most people heard the mention of an unnamed enterprise paying Anthropic $5000/month per developer on inference(!!) If a company if that cost insensitive is there any reason why Anthropic would bother to subsidize them?

Re: Furiosa: 3.5x efficiency over H100s

#19
post #10
post #4

What can it actually run? The fact their benchmark plot refers to Llama 3.1 8b signals to me that it's hand implemented for that model and likely can't run newer / larger models. Why else would you benchmark such an outdated model? Show me a benchmark for gpt-oss-120b or something similar to that.

Looking at their blog, they in fact ran gpt-oss-120b: https://furiosa.ai/blog/serving-gpt-oss-120b-at-5-8-ms-tpot-... I think Llama 3 focus mostly reflects demand. It may be hard to believe, but many people aren't even aware gpt-oss exists.

Many are aware, just can’t offload it onto their hardware.

The 8B models are easier to run on an RTX to compare it to local inference. What llama does on an RTX 5080 at 40t/s, Furiosa should do at 40,000t/s or whatever… it’s an easy way to have a flat comparison across all the different hardware llama.cpp runs on.

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