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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

#31

Post by Dr_Birdbrain »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #26
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…

Not sure if you're implying that it's easy or hard to be a NYer writer

I’m going to say “hard”. That’s a beautiful piece of prose, both because of the social skills needed to elicit the behavior from Huang and because of the narrative skill to tell the story well.

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

#32

Post by joe_the_user »

Aromasin wrote: post #13
hhsectech wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stu…

Yeah - which is to say that that competitors and other competitors aren't actually going to create a CUDA replacement any time soon. And, correct me if I'm wrong, it would be quite possible to create such a thing - AMD had a system which had a tool to do conversion a while back but I recall them not supporting it seriously.

The problem is that when a company has done serious capital investment to advance a market, anyone who invested equivalently wouldn't reap the same rewards - competition would just eat away each company's profits so no one will challenge that.

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

#34

Post by einpoklum »

Aromasin wrote: post #13
hhsectech wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stu…

> but all the alternatives require significant redesign in languages and tools people are unfamiliar with and we can't afford that overhead

Where I work, we've made it a principle to stay OpenCL-compatible even while going with NVIDIA due to their better-performing GPUs. I even go as far as writing kernels that can be compiled as either CUDA C++ or OpenCL-C, with a bit of duct-tape adapter headers:

https://github.com/eyalroz/gpu-kernel-runner/blob/main/kerne...

https://github.com/eyalroz/gpu-kernel-runner/blob/main/kerne...

of course, if you're working with higher-level frameworks then it's more difficult, and you depend on whether or not they provided different backends. So, no thrust for AMD GPUs, for example, but pytorch and TensorFlow do let you use them.

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

#35

Post by HDThoreaun »

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…

The horse anecdote has always struck me as stupid as hell. Horses were replaced because they have no political power, they are tools. As long as we live in a democracy people will not become horses.

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

#36

Post by pmfgpmfg »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #35
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…

The horse anecdote has always struck me as stupid as hell. Horses were replaced because they have no political power, they are tools. As long as we live in a democracy people will not become horses.

Good point! People are already horses in russia.

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

#38

Post by zozbot234 »

joe_the_user wrote: post #32
Aromasin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stu…

Yeah - which is to say that that competitors and other competitors aren't actually going to create a CUDA replacement any time soon. And, correct me if I'm wrong, it would be quite possible to create such a thing - AMD had a system which had a tool to do conversion a while back but I recall them not supporting it seriously. The problem is that when a company has done serious capital investment to advance a market, an…

It's being done. The Mesa project has drivers for OpenCL (RustiCL) and Vulkan under development on any hardware that can provide the underlying facilities for that kind of support. This provides the basic foundation (together with other projects like SYCL) for a high-level alternative that can be properly supported across vendors (minus the expected hardware-specific quirks).

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

#39

Post by cactusplant7374 »

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…

It's not hard to insert oneself into a story. It's harder not to do it.

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

#40

Post by majormajor »

huytersd wrote: post #20
esafak wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[flagged]

The full quote is:

"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. The workers are overwhelmingly male."

That second sentence that the original poster here dropped gives you explicit clarification vs solely trying to infer what the quotation marks are doing.

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