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NSF and Nvidia award Ai2 $152M to support building an open AI ecosystem

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Re: NSF and Nvidia award Ai2 $152M to support building an open AI ecosystem

#31

Post by bilbo0s »

amelius wrote: post #18
sounds wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia is interested in commoditizing their complements. It's a business strategy to decrease the power of OpenAI (for instance). Nvidia dreams of a world where there are lots of "open" alternatives to OpenAI, like there are lots of open game engines and lots open software in general. All buying closed Nvidia chips.

But AI depends on a small number of tensor operators, primitives which can be relatively easily implemented by competitors, so compute is very close to being a commodity when it comes to AI. A company like Cerebras (founded in 2015) proves that this is true. The moat is not in computer architecture. I'd say the real moat is in semiconductor fabrication.

which can be relatively easily implemented by competitors

Oh my.

Please people, try to think back to your engineering classes. Remember the project where you worked with a group to design a processor? I do. Worst semester of my life. (Screw whoever even came up with that damn real analysis math class.) And here's the kicker, I know I'll be dating myself here, but all I had to do for my part was tape it out. Still sucked.

Not sure I'd call the necessary processor design work here "relatively easy"? Even for highly experienced, extremely bright people, this is not "relatively easy".

Far more easy to make the software a commodity. Believe me.

Re: NSF and Nvidia award Ai2 $152M to support building an open AI ecosystem

#32

Post by khalic »

thefaux wrote: post #28

[flagged]

You probably need to look under the hood, it has nothing to do with what popular culture called AI until very recently. It’s just a word generator on steroids, don’t believe the hype about AIs taking over, it’s complete BS.

Re: NSF and Nvidia award Ai2 $152M to support building an open AI ecosystem

#33

Post by cruffle_duffle »

I can’t wait until I can run this shit locally without spending $10,000 on clusters of GPU’s. The models will be trained using some distributed P2P-like technology that “The Man” can’t stop.

Imagine running a model trained by the degenerates on 4chan. Models that encourage you to cheat on your homework, happily crank out photos of world leaders banging farm animals, and gleefully generate the worst gore imaginable. And best of all, any junior high schooler on the planet can do it.

That’s how you know this technology has arrived. None of this sanitized, lawyer approved, safety weenie certified, three letter agency authorized nonsense we have now. Until it’s all local, it’s just an extension of the existing regime.

Re: NSF and Nvidia award Ai2 $152M to support building an open AI ecosystem

#35

Post by colechristensen »

hobofan wrote: post #3

If Nvidia were interested in "open" AI, they would spend time to collaborate with AMD, etc. to build an (updated) open alternative to CUDA. That's probably the most closed part of the whole stack right now.

They could also publish all of their source code, die designs, put their patents in the public domain and go live on a beach somewhere and fish for a living.

CUDA is what they sell, it makes more sense for them to charge for hardware and give the hardware-locked software away for free.

Re: NSF and Nvidia award Ai2 $152M to support building an open AI ecosystem

#36

Post by NitpickLawyer »

khalic wrote: post #29

People seem to be missing the fact that Ai2 is an initiative by the Allen Institute for AI, not a company

And they've already released open source models, with data and training code. They're definitely the good guys here.

Re: NSF and Nvidia award Ai2 $152M to support building an open AI ecosystem

#39

Post by amelius »

sounds wrote: post #26
amelius wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But AI depends on a small number of tensor operators, primitives which can be relatively easily implemented by competitors, so compute is very close to being a commodity when it comes to AI. A company like Cerebras (founded in 2015) proves that this is true. The moat is not in computer architecture. I'd say the real moat is in semiconductor fabrication.

Have you ever tried to run a model from huggingface on an AMD GPU? Semiconductor fabrication is a high risk business. Nvidia invested heavily in CUDA and out-competed AMD (and Intel). They are working hard to keep their edge in developer mindshare, while chasing hardware profits at the same time.

> Have you ever tried to run a model from huggingface on an AMD GPU?

No, but seeing how easily they run on Apple hardware, I don't understand your point, to be honest.

Re: NSF and Nvidia award Ai2 $152M to support building an open AI ecosystem

#40

Post by amelius »

bilbo0s wrote: post #31
amelius wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But AI depends on a small number of tensor operators, primitives which can be relatively easily implemented by competitors, so compute is very close to being a commodity when it comes to AI. A company like Cerebras (founded in 2015) proves that this is true. The moat is not in computer architecture. I'd say the real moat is in semiconductor fabrication.

which can be relatively easily implemented by competitors Oh my. Please people, try to think back to your engineering classes. Remember the project where you worked with a group to design a processor? I do. Worst semester of my life. (Screw whoever even came up with that damn real analysis math class.) And here's the kicker, I know I'll be dating myself here, but all I had to do for my part was tape it out. Still suc…

To be totally honest, the only thing I can distill from this is that perhaps you should have picked an education in CS instead of EE.

I mean this is like saying that a class for building compilers sucked. Still, companies make compilers, and they aren't all >$1B companies. In fact, hobbyists make compilers.

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