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How Jensen Huang's Nvidia is powering the A.I. revolution

newyorker.com

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Re: How Jensen Huang's Nvidia is powering the A.I. revolution

#11

Post by hhsectech »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #9
lvl102 wrote: post #5

Did Nvidia power it or are they stifling it behind its monopoly. Tricky question to answer.

Nvidia doesn't have a monopoly here. Google have their TPU, AMD have MI300, Intel have Data Centre GPU Max, and then there are start ups like Graphcore. There are many alternatives. I think people choose Nvidia because it's easier for them to use. That's because everyone else uses them, and that's because for years and years their competitors (other than Google perhaps) have dropped the ball on good software.

NVIDIA is the leader because most academic AI setups are NVIDIA based.

When AI moves further away from academia NVIDIA will have less of a grip.

Proprietary, hardware specific APIs never stand the test of time. Ask 3Dfx.

Either CUDA will open up, if it is to survive or open API use will spread.

Weirdly, NVIDIA hardware only outperforms competitors on its own API. When you compare NVIDIA on a level playing field, they aren't the clear winners. Nobody is right now.

I suspect the battle ground for AI will be accuracy rather than speed in the medium term and on paper AMD could win there...purely because they aren't shy about over speccing the RAM in their kit and certain price points.

For me, I want to run the largest models I can with the least amount of quantization for the best bang for the buck...and AMD is right there as soon as people start picking up APIs outside of CUDA.

Re: How Jensen Huang's Nvidia is powering the A.I. revolution

#12

Post by hhsectech »

iancmceachern wrote: post #10
larryliu wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are competitions in the AI accelerator field. Google's TPU in addition to Intel Arc and AMD GPUs. The latter two have incomplete pytorch and JAX support.

Yes but those aren't whole ecosystems of hardware and software like what Nvidia has

In the long run, none of that matters.

Re: How Jensen Huang's Nvidia is powering the A.I. revolution

#13

Post by Aromasin »

hhsectech wrote: post #11
fancyfredbot wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia doesn't have a monopoly here. Google have their TPU, AMD have MI300, Intel have Data Centre GPU Max, and then there are start ups like Graphcore. There are many alternatives. I think people choose Nvidia because it's easier for them to use. That's because everyone else uses them, and that's because for years and years their competitors (other than Google perhaps) have dropped the ball on good software.

NVIDIA is the leader because most academic AI setups are NVIDIA based. When AI moves further away from academia NVIDIA will have less of a grip. Proprietary, hardware specific APIs never stand the test of time. Ask 3Dfx. Either CUDA will open up, if it is to survive or open API use will spread. Weirdly, NVIDIA hardware only outperforms competitors on its own API. When you compare NVIDIA on a level playing field, they…

I work for one of their big competitors, and all my conversations with customers tend to follow the same string; "NVIDIA is milking us dry, we want an alternative, but all the alternatives require significant redesign in languages and tools people are unfamiliar with and we can't afford that overhead". It tends to be very cut and dry.

Until university labs get people working in open frameworks and not CUDA, every student joining the industry will default to NVIDIA GPUs until they're forced otherwise. The few people I've managed to convert have been forced by supply constraints, not any desire to innovate or save themselves money. As long as NVIDIA can keep the market satiated with a critical mass of compute, they'll sit on their throne for a long ol' while.

Re: How Jensen Huang's Nvidia is powering the A.I. revolution

#14

Post by gwern »

> In May, hundreds of industry leaders endorsed a statement that equated the risk of runaway A.I. with that of nuclear war. Huang didn’t sign it. Some economists have observed that the Industrial Revolution led to a relative decline in the global population of horses, and have wondered if A.I. might do the same to humans. “Horses have limited career options,” Huang said. “For example, horses can’t type.” As he finished eating, I expressed my concerns that, someday soon, I would feed my notes from our conversation into an intelligence engine, then watch as it produced structured, superior prose. Huang didn’t dismiss this possibility, but he assured me that I had a few years before my John Henry moment. “It will come for the fiction writers first,” he said. Then he tipped the waitress a thousand dollars, and stood up to accept his award.

If you ever wondered if you had what it took to be a NYer writer, consider if you could have provoked & recorded this vignette.

Re: How Jensen Huang's Nvidia is powering the A.I. revolution

#15

Post by ViktorRay »

“Employee demographics are “diverse,” sort of—I would guess, based on a visual survey of the cafeteria at lunchtime, that about a third of the staff is South Asian, a third is East Asian, and a third is white.”

This part of the article bothered me. Why was diverse placed in quotation marks? Aren’t South Asians and East Asians considered minorities?

Also South Asians are a very diverse group in it itself. As are East Asians. Many different languages and cultures….

So why was diverse in quotation marks? Why did the author say “sort of”???

Re: How Jensen Huang's Nvidia is powering the A.I. revolution

#16

Post by matthewmcg »

gwern wrote: post #14

> In May, hundreds of industry leaders endorsed a statement that equated the risk of runaway A.I. with that of nuclear war. Huang didn’t sign it. Some economists have observed that the Industrial Revolution led to a relative decline in the global population of horses, and have wondered if A.I. might do the same to humans. “Horses have limited career options,” Huang said. “For example, horses can’t type.” As he finish…

My all time favorite from Ian Parker’s NYer profile of Johnny Ive:

I asked Jeff Williams, the senior vice-president, if the Apple Watch seemed more purely Ive’s than previous company products. After a silence of twenty-five seconds, during which Apple made fifty thousand dollars in profit, he said, “Yes.”

Re: How Jensen Huang's Nvidia is powering the A.I. revolution

#17

Post by fourier456 »

ViktorRay wrote: post #15

“Employee demographics are “diverse,” sort of—I would guess, based on a visual survey of the cafeteria at lunchtime, that about a third of the staff is South Asian, a third is East Asian, and a third is white.” This part of the article bothered me. Why was diverse placed in quotation marks? Aren’t South Asians and East Asians considered minorities? Also South Asians are a very diverse group in it itself. As are East…

Rhetorical question, what do you think?

Re: How Jensen Huang's Nvidia is powering the A.I. revolution

#18

Post by esafak »

ViktorRay wrote: post #15

“Employee demographics are “diverse,” sort of—I would guess, based on a visual survey of the cafeteria at lunchtime, that about a third of the staff is South Asian, a third is East Asian, and a third is white.” This part of the article bothered me. Why was diverse placed in quotation marks? Aren’t South Asians and East Asians considered minorities? Also South Asians are a very diverse group in it itself. As are East…

I think the writer is insinuating that ethnicity is only one type of diversity. What if 95% of those Asian employees were male, for instance?

Re: How Jensen Huang's Nvidia is powering the A.I. revolution

#19

Post by jhj »

hhsectech wrote: post #11
fancyfredbot wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia doesn't have a monopoly here. Google have their TPU, AMD have MI300, Intel have Data Centre GPU Max, and then there are start ups like Graphcore. There are many alternatives. I think people choose Nvidia because it's easier for them to use. That's because everyone else uses them, and that's because for years and years their competitors (other than Google perhaps) have dropped the ball on good software.

NVIDIA is the leader because most academic AI setups are NVIDIA based. When AI moves further away from academia NVIDIA will have less of a grip. Proprietary, hardware specific APIs never stand the test of time. Ask 3Dfx. Either CUDA will open up, if it is to survive or open API use will spread. Weirdly, NVIDIA hardware only outperforms competitors on its own API. When you compare NVIDIA on a level playing field, they…

> Either CUDA will open up, if it is to survive or open API use will spread.

I don't really think so, at least not anytime soon while the hardware functionality continues to evolve so much, and while they seem to be concentrating on the high end devices/architecture rather than low-end stuff.

I've been more or less exclusively writing CUDA for the past decade in the AI/ML space (though have spent some time with OpenCL, Vulkan and other things along the way too). What a GPU is or should be I don't think has reached an evolutionary end yet. CUDA also is not a static thing, and it has co-evolved with the hardware, not being locked into some static industry standard with a boatload of annoying glExtWhatever dangling off of it. Over the past decade or so, Nvidia has introduced new ways that the register file can be used (Kepler shuffles), changed the memory model of GPUs and the warp execution model (to avoid deadlock/starvation by breaking the lockstep behavior somewhat), slowly changing the grid/CTA model (cf. cooperative groups, CTA clusters), adding more asynchronous components to the host APIs and the hardware (async DMAs), and has constantly changed the underlying instruction set, all of which leaks into CUDA in some way.

Re: How Jensen Huang's Nvidia is powering the A.I. revolution

#20

Post by huytersd »

esafak wrote: post #18
ViktorRay wrote: post #15

“Employee demographics are “diverse,” sort of—I would guess, based on a visual survey of the cafeteria at lunchtime, that about a third of the staff is South Asian, a third is East Asian, and a third is white.” This part of the article bothered me. Why was diverse placed in quotation marks? Aren’t South Asians and East Asians considered minorities? Also South Asians are a very diverse group in it itself. As are East…

I think the writer is insinuating that ethnicity is only one type of diversity. What if 95% of those Asian employees were male, for instance?

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