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TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term

uncoveralpha.com

21–30 of 328 posts

Re: TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term

#21
post #17

How high are the chances that as soon as China produces their own competitive TPU/GPU, they'll invade Taiwan in order to starve the West in regards to processing power, while at the same time getting an exclusive grip on the Taiwanese Fabs?

Not very. Those fabs are vulnerable things, shame if something happens to them. If China attacks, it would be for various other reasons and processors are only one of many considerations, no matter how improbable it might sound to an HN-er.

Re: TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term

#22
post #4

Right because people would love to get locked into another even more expensive platform.

That's mentioned in the article, but is the lock-in really that big? In some cases, it's as easy as changing the backend of your high-level ML library.

That's what it is on paper. But in practice you trade one set of hardware idiosyncrasies for another and unless you have the right people to deal with that, it's a hassle.

Re: TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term

#23
post #2

A question I don't see addressed in all these articles: what prevents Nvidia from doing the same thing and iterating on their more general-purpose GPU towards a more focused TPU-like chip as well, if that turns out to be what the market really wants.

They lose the competitive advantage. They have nothing more to offer than what Google has in-house.

Re: TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term

#24
post #20
post #2

A question I don't see addressed in all these articles: what prevents Nvidia from doing the same thing and iterating on their more general-purpose GPU towards a more focused TPU-like chip as well, if that turns out to be what the market really wants.

They will, I'm sure. The big difference is that Google is both the chip designer *and* the AI company. So they get both sets of profits. Both Google and Nvidia contract TSMC for chips. Then Nvidia sells them at a huge profit. Then OpenAI (for example) buys them at that inflated rate and them puts them into production. So while Nvidia is "selling shovels", Google is making their own shovels and has their own mines.

Aka vertical integration.

Re: TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term

#25
post #17

How high are the chances that as soon as China produces their own competitive TPU/GPU, they'll invade Taiwan in order to starve the West in regards to processing power, while at the same time getting an exclusive grip on the Taiwanese Fabs?

Seems low at the moment with the concept of G2 being floated as generic understanding of China's ascension to where Russia used to be effectively recreating bipolar semi cold war world order. Mind, I am not saying impossible, but there are reasons China would want to avoid this scenario ( probably one of the few things US would not tolerate and would likely retaliate ).

Re: TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term

#26

In my 20+ years of following NVIDIA, I have learned to never bet against them long-term. I actually do not know exactly why they continually win, but they do. The main issue they have a 3-4 year gap between wanting a new design pivot and realizing it (silicon has a long "pipeline"), it can seem that they may be missing a new trend or swerve in the demands of the market, it is often simply because there is this delay.

You could have said the same thing about Intel for ~50 years.

Re: TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term

#27

In my 20+ years of following NVIDIA, I have learned to never bet against them long-term. I actually do not know exactly why they continually win, but they do. The main issue they have a 3-4 year gap between wanting a new design pivot and realizing it (silicon has a long "pipeline"), it can seem that they may be missing a new trend or swerve in the demands of the market, it is often simply because there is this delay.

Fair, but the 75% margins can be reduced to 25% with healthy competition. The lack of competition in the frontier chips space was always the bottleneck to commoditization of computation, if such a thing is even possible

Re: TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term

#28
post #11

That and the fact they can self-fund the whole AI venture and don't require outside investment.

That and they were harvesting data way before it was cool, and now that it is cool, they're in a privileged position since almost no-one can afford to block GoogleBot.

They do voluntarily offer a way to signal that the data GoogleBot sees is not to be used for training, for now, and assuming you take them at their word, but AFAIK there is no way to stop them doing RAG on your content without destroying your SEO in the process.

Re: TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term

#29
post #4

Right because people would love to get locked into another even more expensive platform.

That's mentioned in the article, but is the lock-in really that big? In some cases, it's as easy as changing the backend of your high-level ML library.

I thin k you can only run on google cloud not aws bare metal azure etc

Re: TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term

#30
post #17

How high are the chances that as soon as China produces their own competitive TPU/GPU, they'll invade Taiwan in order to starve the West in regards to processing power, while at the same time getting an exclusive grip on the Taiwanese Fabs?

If they have the fabs but ASML doesn't send them their new machines, they will just end up in the same situation as now, just one generation later. If China wants to compete, they need to learn how to make the EUV light and mirrors.
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