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Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer

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Re: Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer

#41

Post by goku12 »

This may not seem like an appropriate forum to say this, but this is a relevant and serious issue to neglect. With the current political climate and this relentless push for hundreds of these massive datacenters, everyone seems to have completely forgotten about the carbon emissions and climate change. These datacenters are such massive resource hogs that living near them is unviable due to their economic impact and overconsumption. Their impact on global climate, economy and even technology (talking about the RAM crunch) is much worse. But nobody seems to be keeping tabs anymore.

One thing to remember is that the climate catastrophe is not a single cataclysmic event like falling off a cliff. It's more like a lanslide that starts small and then gradually accretes into a massive disaster that's barreling towards you. And we're in it already. We're already paying a price in terms of human lives and the planet's biomass as a whole due to natural disasters that are becoming more frequent. We don't notice it because the increase is gradual.

And all that for what? Writing reports, reading emails, generating endless slop and waging wars? I'm not against AI or any other technology. But this cost doesn't seem justified considering their contributions to serious endeavors like medical research and habitat loss. This is ironic because we were talking two decades ago about ditching interpreted languages in favor of compiled languages for servers/services, in order to improve their carbon footprint. It looks like a joke today considering what these AI datacenters and crypto farms do. But we really can't really afford to forget it now. Remember that when you pay for AI with your money, someone else pays for it with their blood.

Re: Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer

#42

Post by Melatonic »

hedayet wrote: post #39
giancarlostoro wrote: post #32

Makes me wonder if Mark Zuckerberg had not had this weird vision of making Second Life VR for Meta and focused on AI as it was looming if they could have built a serious competitor to Anthropic and OpenAI. I know he tried, but it was already late to the party, but still, had he tried a lot sooner, would he have gotten more built? I think his obsession with making the VR stuff happen is holding him back.

Facebook's strength has never been innovation, but adapting to the changes; mostly through acquisition. With the 20/20 hindsight - I'd say the VR bet was too early for Facebook. Instead of trying to build a future tech, they should have acquired it another few years later, only after the tech has reached a more mature stage. Meta still has a chance to catch up in the AI race given they are not trying to build afresh,…

I think they were just early with VR in general (they did buy the best VR at the time). And then severely miscalculated what VR would actually be great for.

Eventually we'll get super cheap and light headsets or glasses and gaming will be pretty cool. They should have focused all in on that. It's already a huge industry

Re: Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer

#43

Post by peyton »

goku12 wrote: post #41

This may not seem like an appropriate forum to say this, but this is a relevant and serious issue to neglect. With the current political climate and this relentless push for hundreds of these massive datacenters, everyone seems to have completely forgotten about the carbon emissions and climate change. These datacenters are such massive resource hogs that living near them is unviable due to their economic impact and…

We “forgot” about it because climate-as-energy-policy was a lever for control because energy touches everything. Now that AI will touch everything, AI is the focus of those who seek control over others.

There has never been an energy transition that wasn’t driven by economics. From wood to whale oil to coal to petroleum. If you care about climate and not control over others, that is the place to focus.

Re: Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer

#44

Post by bredren »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #32

Makes me wonder if Mark Zuckerberg had not had this weird vision of making Second Life VR for Meta and focused on AI as it was looming if they could have built a serious competitor to Anthropic and OpenAI. I know he tried, but it was already late to the party, but still, had he tried a lot sooner, would he have gotten more built? I think his obsession with making the VR stuff happen is holding him back.

The key early signals from OpenAI FB missed were when OpenAI Five was featured DOTA 2's The International in 2018 and in April 2019 when it beat the pro team OG.

I think the people who care about that game and used the types media channels FB monitored was too small to show up on the company's radar.

But I'm not convinced Zuck was truly all in on VR. I thought the switch to Meta was a hasty attempt to rebrand under fire of a whistleblower / document leak cycle.

Despite all the money spent on VR labs, I always thought the pivot was much more of a Philip-Morris -> Altria thing than Dunkin' Donuts -> Dunkin'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI_Five#Reception

Re: Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer

#45

Post by r14c »

peyton wrote: post #43
goku12 wrote: post #41

This may not seem like an appropriate forum to say this, but this is a relevant and serious issue to neglect. With the current political climate and this relentless push for hundreds of these massive datacenters, everyone seems to have completely forgotten about the carbon emissions and climate change. These datacenters are such massive resource hogs that living near them is unviable due to their economic impact and…

We “forgot” about it because climate-as-energy-policy was a lever for control because energy touches everything. Now that AI will touch everything, AI is the focus of those who seek control over others. There has never been an energy transition that wasn’t driven by economics. From wood to whale oil to coal to petroleum. If you care about climate and not control over others, that is the place to focus.

Everyone else on the planet is doing just fine our policymakers are just pretending like climate change isn't real. We could be investing in and subsidizing proven methods like mass transit, renewable energy, &c. Nobody has to be coerced for this to happen. Unless like getting less subsidies because fossil fuels need to get their externalities priced in is coercion lmao

Re: Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer

#46

Post by stingraycharles »

bredren wrote: post #44
giancarlostoro wrote: post #32

Makes me wonder if Mark Zuckerberg had not had this weird vision of making Second Life VR for Meta and focused on AI as it was looming if they could have built a serious competitor to Anthropic and OpenAI. I know he tried, but it was already late to the party, but still, had he tried a lot sooner, would he have gotten more built? I think his obsession with making the VR stuff happen is holding him back.

The key early signals from OpenAI FB missed were when OpenAI Five was featured DOTA 2's The International in 2018 and in April 2019 when it beat the pro team OG. I think the people who care about that game and used the types media channels FB monitored was too small to show up on the company's radar. But I'm not convinced Zuck was truly all in on VR. I thought the switch to Meta was a hasty attempt to rebrand under f…

Zuck is all-in on building their own platform and becoming a gatekeeper like Apple, Google and Microsoft, rather than operating within their ecosystems.

VR was one dream to achieve that, it’s more difficult to envision that with AI which is why I suspect he was more reluctant to embrace it. AI models are more likely to become a commodity and running inside one of the platforms of the gatekeepers, which is not what Zuck wants.

Re: Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer

#47

Post by audunw »

leptons wrote: post #23
wmf wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

focus on chips that nobody else wants to make That's what happened here. Meta wants a Neoverse V3 CPU but no one will make it for them. So Arm has to make it.

ARM does not have their own fab, someone else is doing the actual making. ARM helped Meta design the thing.

That’s overly pedantic.

Then you’d say that Apple doesn’t make their laptops. Foxconn does.

The kind of work ARM would do to “make” a chip themselves goes beyond just design. It’s synthesis, P&R, test, packaging (generally a different company than the fab), yield management, inventory/logistics, etc.

Re: Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer

#48

Post by naveen99 »

Aurornis wrote: post #40
giancarlostoro wrote: post #32

Makes me wonder if Mark Zuckerberg had not had this weird vision of making Second Life VR for Meta and focused on AI as it was looming if they could have built a serious competitor to Anthropic and OpenAI. I know he tried, but it was already late to the party, but still, had he tried a lot sooner, would he have gotten more built? I think his obsession with making the VR stuff happen is holding him back.

Meta was on a roll with their early research and work with Llama and other models. Then it all just seemed to trail off. I’m sure they’re doing some interesting things internally but it does feel like they were in the right place to have capitalized on it a lot more.

Except qwen became to llama what PyTorch was to tensorflow.

Re: Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer

#49

Post by mortsnort »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #32

Makes me wonder if Mark Zuckerberg had not had this weird vision of making Second Life VR for Meta and focused on AI as it was looming if they could have built a serious competitor to Anthropic and OpenAI. I know he tried, but it was already late to the party, but still, had he tried a lot sooner, would he have gotten more built? I think his obsession with making the VR stuff happen is holding him back.

Is being a serious competitor to OpenAI a good business proposition? OpenAI burns through insane amounts of cash and it seems pretty likely that it will ultimately just be replaced by cheaper Chinese models/inference.

The real product is the agent harnesses, which to be fair can be trained specifically to work with an in-house harness, but not sure it's necessary to own the models, especially if Chinese companies are licensing theirs for fine-tuning like we see with Cursor.

Re: Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer

#50

Post by bredren »

stingraycharles wrote: post #46
bredren wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key early signals from OpenAI FB missed were when OpenAI Five was featured DOTA 2's The International in 2018 and in April 2019 when it beat the pro team OG. I think the people who care about that game and used the types media channels FB monitored was too small to show up on the company's radar. But I'm not convinced Zuck was truly all in on VR. I thought the switch to Meta was a hasty attempt to rebrand under f…

Zuck is all-in on building their own platform and becoming a gatekeeper like Apple, Google and Microsoft, rather than operating within their ecosystems. VR was one dream to achieve that, it’s more difficult to envision that with AI which is why I suspect he was more reluctant to embrace it. AI models are more likely to become a commodity and running inside one of the platforms of the gatekeepers, which is not what Zu…

That’s fine but this dream was previously pursued with mobile hardware.

FWIW, oculus represented a true competitive advantage. And I don’t think it was a coincidence that the Supernatural acquisition was temporarily blocked by the feds.

I think Apple was genuinely worried that fitness was (or still is) a killer use case and threat to Vision Pro.

The delay was enough to make FB lose focus / pivot again into AI.

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