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

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

#91

Post by BluSyn »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #88
BluSyn wrote: post #85

Nvidia should enjoy this period while it lasts. I fail to see any future where custom ASICs don't each their lunch. There's so much opportunity for custom silicon to massively improve compute-per-watt -- for both for training and inference. Nvidia got lucky with their high-memory GPUs being early to this space, but the usefulness of that architecture has already peaked.

I see plenty of custom ASIC startups but they all struggle to get decent funding. Which means they are all one tape-out away from insolvency. I don't really see NVIDIA's dominance changing (other than whatever AMD has in the pipeline) Unless VC's change their risk appetite and take interest in HW startup funding which seems unlikely considering the avg returns and success rate of HW startups.

In the short-term the ASICs won't come from startups. Think companies that already have custom silicon + deep pockets + a need to squeeze every watt at scale.

Eg, Google (TPU), Apple (NPU), Amazon, Telsa (Dojo), Microsoft/OpenAI, etc.

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

#92

Post by ralfd »

joe_the_user wrote: post #32
Aromasin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for one of their big competitors, and all my conversations with customers tend to follow the same string; "NVIDIA is milking us dry, we want an alternative, but all the alternatives require significant redesign in languages and tools people are unfamiliar with and we can't afford that overhead". It tends to be very cut and dry. Until university labs get people working in open frameworks and not CUDA, every stu…

Yeah - which is to say that that competitors and other competitors aren't actually going to create a CUDA replacement any time soon. And, correct me if I'm wrong, it would be quite possible to create such a thing - AMD had a system which had a tool to do conversion a while back but I recall them not supporting it seriously. The problem is that when a company has done serious capital investment to advance a market, an…

The second mover advantage though is that you can just copy the first company and avoid blind alleys.

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

#93

Post by superchroma »

dmix wrote: post #69
superchroma wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

And what is it you do to survive?

And when you're done doing whatever it is that is, do you go home to your home, your stable, if you like, to sleep and eat?

Are you truly so different from a horse in the scheme of things just because you spend a portion of your free time staring at a mobile phone?

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

#94

Post by gwern »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #35
gwern wrote: post #14

> In May, hundreds of industry leaders endorsed a statement that equated the risk of runaway A.I. with that of nuclear war. Huang didn’t sign it. Some economists have observed that the Industrial Revolution led to a relative decline in the global population of horses, and have wondered if A.I. might do the same to humans. “Horses have limited career options,” Huang said. “For example, horses can’t type.” As he finish…

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.

A democracy of whom? When AGI comes and the AIs are as smart or smarter than you, what's going to keep you enfranchised? Huang's suggestion is that it will be your ability to... type faster than a computer can. (Good luck with that.)

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

#95

Post by b20000 »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #76
b20000 wrote: post #68

Why is this guy portayed as some kind of genius?

"This guy" founded the company in 1993 and is still leading it, quite capably, 30 years later. It is often said that many startups need one type of CEO at founding but it takes a different skill set to be CEO of an established company. To lead it from 3 people to 25,000+, to have both technical chops, business chops, and PR chops is a rare combination. Back in the early 90s there were countless 3D chip startups, prob…

Lots of people have vision and can do all of the above. I think what you meant is that he was good at convincing investors?

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

#96

Post by tasty_freeze »

b20000 wrote: post #95
tasty_freeze wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This guy" founded the company in 1993 and is still leading it, quite capably, 30 years later. It is often said that many startups need one type of CEO at founding but it takes a different skill set to be CEO of an established company. To lead it from 3 people to 25,000+, to have both technical chops, business chops, and PR chops is a rare combination. Back in the early 90s there were countless 3D chip startups, prob…

Lots of people have vision and can do all of the above. I think what you meant is that he was good at convincing investors?

State your opinion of what you think instead of pretending to put words in my mouth or know what is in my head.

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

#97

Post by b20000 »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #96
b20000 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people have vision and can do all of the above. I think what you meant is that he was good at convincing investors?

State your opinion of what you think instead of pretending to put words in my mouth or know what is in my head.

My opinion is that it is common to confuse skill/genius with luck, timing, social network.

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

#98

Post by HDThoreaun »

gwern wrote: post #94
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.

A democracy of whom ? When AGI comes and the AIs are as smart or smarter than you, what's going to keep you enfranchised? Huang's suggestion is that it will be your ability to... type faster than a computer can. (Good luck with that.)

The 400 million guns owned by the people of this country. Humans will not go quietly into the night. They might lose some sense of purpose as they work less, but they will never accept a government that is not fundamentally based on humanism and they will never accept reduction in quality of life as GDP expands.

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

#99

Post by rnk »

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…

You keep coming back to armed civilians will not accept worse living conditions. If some calamity comes, like global warming removes say the us ability to grow enough food or we run out of oil and there's not other energy sources, the guns aren't going to fix things. You are going to have a revolt against the govt because inflation is too high or China nuked us and ruined our country?

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

#100

Post by HDThoreaun »

rnk wrote: post #99
HDThoreaun wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You keep coming back to armed civilians will not accept worse living conditions. If some calamity comes, like global warming removes say the us ability to grow enough food or we run out of oil and there's not other energy sources, the guns aren't going to fix things. You are going to have a revolt against the govt because inflation is too high or China nuked us and ruined our country?

I thought the point of the horse analogy is that total wealth will increase but some large group of people will be so left out that their quality of living actually decreases. Like mass unemployment due to robots doing all the jobs. In that scenario I do believe there would be an armed revolt without the institution of a massive welfare state.
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