Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

uncoveralpha.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 328 posts

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

#31

Post by [deleted] »

jsheard wrote: post #28
dana321 wrote: 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 th…

[deleted]

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

#32

Post by sorenjan »

llm_nerd wrote: post #12
sbarre wrote: 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.

For users buying H200s for AI workloads, the "ASIC" tensor cores deliver the overwhelming bulk of performance. So they already do this, and have been since Volta in 2017. To put it into perspective, the tensor cores deliver about 2,000 TFLOPs of FP8, and half that for FP16, and this is all tensor FMA/MAC (comprising the bulk of compute for AI workloads). The CUDA cores -- the rest of the GPU -- deliver more in the 70…

Is it the Cuda cores that run the vertex/fragment/etc shaders in normal GPUs? Where does the ray tracing units fit in? How much of a modern Nvidia GPU is general purpose vs specialized to graphics pipelines?

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

#33

Post by davidmurdoch »

riku_iki wrote: post #19
villgax wrote: post #16

https://killedbygoogle.com

It's all small products which didn't receive traction.

It's not though. Chromecast, g suite legacy, podcast, music, url shortener,... These weren't small products.

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

#34

Post by ricardo81 »

It's a cool subject and article and things I only have a general understanding of (considering the place of posting).

What I'm sure about is having a programming unit more purposed to a task is more optimal than a general programming unit designed to accommodate all programming tasks.

More and more of the economics of programming boils down to energy usage and invariably towards physical rules, the efficiency of the process has the benefit of less energy consumed.

As a Layman is makes general sense. Maybe a future where productivity is based closer on energy efficiency rather than monetary gain pushes the economy in better directions.

Cryptocurrency and LLMs seem like they'll play out that story over the next 10 years.

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

#35

Post by GordonS »

qwertox wrote: 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?

Highly unlikely. Despite the rampant anti-Chinese FUD that's so prevalent in the media (and, sadly, here on HN), China isn't really in the habit of invading other lands.

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

#36

Post by zenoprax »

I have read in the past that ASICs for LLMs are not as simple a solution compared to cryptocurrency. In order to design and build the ASIC you need to commit to a specific architecture: a hashing algorithm for a cryptocurrency is fixed but the LLMs are always changing.

Am I misunderstanding "TPU" in the context of the article?

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

#37

Post by mrbungie »

dana321 wrote: post #11

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

The most fun fact about all the developments post-ChatGPT is that people apparently forgot that Google was doing actual AI before AI meant (only) ML and GenAI/LLMs, and they were top players at it.

Arguably main OpenAI raison d'être was to be a counterweight to that pre-2023 Google AI dominance. But I'd also argue that OpenAI lost its way.

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

#38

Post by paulmist »

> The GPUs were designed for graphics [...] However, because they are designed to handle everything from video game textures to scientific simulations, they carry “architectural baggage.” [...] A TPU, on the other hand, strips away all that baggage. It has no hardware for rasterization or texture mapping.

With simulations becoming key to training models doesn't this seem like a huge problem for Google?

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

#39

Post by thomascgalvin »

siliconc0w wrote: post #15

Google has always had great tech - their problem is the product or the perseverance, conviction, and taste needed to make things people want.

Their incentive structure doesn't lead to longevity. Nobody gets promoted for keeping a product alive, they get promoted for shipping something new. That's why we're on version 37 of whatever their chat client is called now.

I think we can be reasonably sure that search, Gmail, and some flavor of AI will live on, but other than that, Google apps are basically end-of-life at launch.

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

#40

Post by bgwalter »

riku_iki wrote: post #19
villgax wrote: post #16

https://killedbygoogle.com

It's all small products which didn't receive traction.

Google Hangouts wasn't small. Google+ was big and supposedly "the future" and is the canonical example of a huge misallocation of resources.

Google will have no problem discontinuing Google "AI" if they finally notice that people want a computer to shut up rather than talk at them.

Post reply on HN