How Jensen Huang's Nvidia is powering the A.I. revolution • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by didibus » Thu, Nov 30, 2023, 1:32 AM UTC

HDThoreaun wrote: post #56

dclowd9901 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your basis for this statement? We have absolutely _numerous_ examples of people throughout history receiving and accepting horrible conditions cast upon them. Even today. And as far as I can tell, we still have similar power structures that would enable those situations to continue occurring.

Name some examples of large, militarily powerful groups accepting living conditions that were worse than the previous generation experienced, not due to natural disasters. People have never accepted that. Sure they've had shitty living conditions, but they started shitty, they didn't get worse. Sure they've been enslaved, but the civilians in this country are heavily armed enough to fight back against a government th…

There's tons of examples:

North Korea, after the Korean war, their living conditions got way way worse than when under Japanese occupation, even though their military has improved.

Afghanistan, since it's been overtaken by the Taliban, even though they are mightier from a military standpoint, the living conditions have become worst.

The Soviet Union post WWII, they came out of it as a military superpower, but the damages from the war meant their living conditions were way worse.

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

#62

Post by didibus » Thu, Nov 30, 2023, 1:37 AM UTC

Nathanba wrote: post #42

HDThoreaun wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People have political power ultimately because they have military and economic power. That would potentially change if politicians have artificial people under their control that can patrol the streets and enforce any law they want and man the factories.

I think the idea that this will come from the politicians and government is misguided.

This will come from the capitalist system, businesses will be driving the obsolescence of humans, not governments.

Once the owners of the means of productions don't need humans in their workforce, what value to they bring?

It will be much harder to "revolt" against capitalism/businesses than a central government.

And the biggest danger here, is it means the end of the capitalist system as the best way to increase living standards. If capitalism doesn't work as a means of redistribution anymore, because humans have been devalued, what economic model can replace it and be as successful?

We're re-entering an era where economic systems are all going to favor a few classes, and impoverish the rest.

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

#63

Post by nsoonhui » Thu, Nov 30, 2023, 1:48 AM UTC

ViktorRay wrote: post #15

“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.” This part of the article bothered me. Why was diverse placed in quotation marks? Aren’t South Asians and East Asians considered minorities? Also South Asians are a very diverse group in it itself. As are East…

What really pains me is the topic of diversity must somehow crop up, even though we are discussing on things that have absolutely no relevance to it at all.

What does whether someone is a White or Asian got to do with his competency on the job?

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

#64

Post by Quinzel » Thu, Nov 30, 2023, 1:50 AM UTC

Quinzel wrote: post #55

dmix wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horses were bread for that work as well, there was a direct 1-to-1 correlation between the two. Not so with humans.

By “bread” do you mean “bred”?

https://twitter.com/Hyphie_/status/1730027917525262513

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

#65

Post by iancmceachern » Thu, Nov 30, 2023, 1:56 AM UTC

superchroma wrote: post #47

dmix wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horses were bread for that work as well, there was a direct 1-to-1 correlation between the two. Not so with humans.

So what exactly is it you do all day? How do you pay rent?

I think they make weird horse related spelling errors

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

#66

Post by lmm » Thu, Nov 30, 2023, 2:21 AM UTC

hhsectech wrote: post #11

fancyfredbot wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia doesn't have a monopoly here. Google have their TPU, AMD have MI300, Intel have Data Centre GPU Max, and then there are start ups like Graphcore. There are many alternatives. I think people choose Nvidia because it's easier for them to use. That's because everyone else uses them, and that's because for years and years their competitors (other than Google perhaps) have dropped the ball on good software.

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…

> Proprietary, hardware specific APIs never stand the test of time. Ask 3Dfx.

3DFX lost for other reasons. DirectX is doing fine despite having had open competition for decades.

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

#67

Post by lmm » Thu, Nov 30, 2023, 2:37 AM UTC

hhsectech wrote: post #12

iancmceachern wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but those aren't whole ecosystems of hardware and software like what Nvidia has

In the long run, none of that matters.

In the long run we're all dead.

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

#68

Post by b20000 » Thu, Nov 30, 2023, 2:51 AM UTC

Why is this guy portayed as some kind of genius?

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

#69

Post by dmix » Thu, Nov 30, 2023, 2:59 AM UTC

superchroma wrote: post #47

dmix wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horses were bread for that work as well, there was a direct 1-to-1 correlation between the two. Not so with humans.

So what exactly is it you do all day? How do you pay rent?

Survive. My survival is my own will. My parents didn't have me to benefit themselves in industry, they only want me to survive in the best capacity possible. I'm not sure how that distinction is not 100% obvious in 2023. It's not the 1700s in a planet covered in subsistence farms who need kids to work.

This is handwringing over the decline of paper or pencils after computers came about when paper didn't magically come about by itself. Horses were not wild animals in North America at any point in modern history and barely in other continents. They were purely bred for industry, travel, and hobby. When industry and travel no longer became a thing we stopped producing them: a clear 1-to-1 correlation.

There's already been reductions in human populations without AI from leisure, abundance, culture, etc, - a very very different causality than horses.

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

#70

Post by krackers » Thu, Nov 30, 2023, 2:59 AM UTC

VikingCoder wrote: post #4

I remember when GLSL was being proposed and there was a lot of debate about how General Purpose it should be. Would people run non-graphical shaders on their GPUs? Yup.

Aren't compute shaders basically a poor man's cuda?