621–630 of 668 posts
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Yes. It has more tape outs at this stage of development than both N5 or N3. It’s wildly popular for chip designers it seems.
I thought Apple gets exclusive access to the latest node for the first 1-2 years. Is that not the case?
We are way past peak LLM and it shows. They are basically advertise spacing heating as if it's some sort of advancement, while the tech seems to have stagnated, and they re just making the horses faster. The market should have punished this
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OpenAI is profitable if they stop training their next generation models. Their unit economics are extremely favorable. I do buy that they are extremely over-valued if they have to slow down on model training. For cloud providers, the analysis is a bit more complex; presumably if training demand craters then the existing inference demand would be met at a lower price, and maybe you’d see some consolidation as margins…
> OpenAI is profitable if they stop training their next generation models. Their unit economics are extremely favorable. But OpenAI can't stop training their next generation models. OpenAI already spends over 50% of their revenue on inference cost [1] with some vendors spending over 100% of their revenue on inference. The real cash cow for them is in the business segment. The problem here is models are rapidly cloned…
For example, inference on older GPUs is actually more profitable than bleeding-edge right now; the shops that are selling hosted inference have options to broaden their portfolio the advancement of the frontier slows.
Cloud providers are currently “un-differentiated”, but there are three huge ones making profits and some small ones too. Hosting is an economy-of-scale business and so is inference.
And all of these startups you quote like Cursor that are not free-cash-flow positive are simply playing the VC land grab game. Costs will rise for consumers if VCs stop funding, sure. That says nothing about how much TAM there is at the new higher price point.
The idea that OAI is un-differentiated is just weird. They have a massively popular consumer offering, a huge bankroll, and can continue to innovate on features. Their consumer offering has remained sticky even though Claude and Gemini have both had periods of being the best model to those in the know.
And generally speaking there are huge opportunities to do enterprise integrations and build out the retooling of $10T of economic activities, just with the models we have now; a Salesforce play would be a natural pivot for them.
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I love that term "refining energy". We need to plan for massive growth in electricity production to have the supply to refine.
Sounds smart but it’s abusing the semantics of “refine” and is therefore ultimately vacuous.
Raw AC comes in, then gets stepped down, filtered, converted into DC rails, gated, timed, and pulsed. That’s already an industrial refinement process. The "crude" incoming power is shaped into the precise, stable forms that CPUs, GPUs, RAM, storage, and networking can actually use.
Then those stable voltages get flipped billions of times per second into ordered states, which become instructions, models, inferences, and other high-value "product."
It sure seems like series of processes for refining something.
I only have an 600W computer
This is a dot-com level bubble.
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That's pretty interesting. Is it just because the power channels are the most fundamental aspect of the building? I'm sorta surprised you can't rip out old cables and drop in new ones, or something to that effect, but I also know NOTHING about electricity.
Not an expert, but it’s probably related to cooling. Every joule of that electricity that goes in must also leave the datacenter as heat. And the whole design of a datacenter is centered around cooling requirements.
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They are aiming at being the first to develop an AGI and eventually superintelligence. Something that can replace human workers. Walmart is small fish in comparison. OpenAI is currently in the lead, so their chances are decent.
This is an argument that OpenAI needs to achieve a supernatural outcome in order to be a financial success.
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Basically, yes. When you stand up something that big, you need to work with the local utilities to ensure they have the capacity for what you're doing. While you can ask for more power later on, if the utilities can't supply it or the grid can't transport it, you're SOL.
You could in theory supplement it with rooftop solar and batteries, especially if you can get customers who can curtail their energy use easily. Datacentres have a lot of roof space, they could at least reduce their daytime energy costs a bit. I wonder why you don't see many doing solar, do the economics not work out yet?