The thing I like the most about the current AI wave is the pressure is putting on computing hardware. Yes, mobile phones with long battery lives are cool and all of that, but most cool things I like are locked behind huge computational requirements.
What sort of on-board compute do you typically have today?
watt-hour: you cannot subtract time from power, it doesn't make any sense.
watt/hour: delta of power per time, something very weird.
Researchers at US Berkeley came out with the algorithm they named SpeedFolding in October of last year. Watch https://youtu.be/UTMT2WAUlRw?t=511 and then realize that linked excerpt is sped up 9x.
If we had 9x faster compute we could have laundry folding robots which is one thing, but that amount of compute would enable robots to do tons more tasks in industry.
Getting robots to move quickly is easy; getting them to move quickly to exactly where you want them, or with exactly as much force... that is much, much more difficult. Double for mobile robots where you don't have a good energy source. If cost is an issue that is another dimension -- powerful and accurate actuators are extremely expensive.
There is another reply to your comment that shares a lot of what I have experienced. You have so many pieces of code that need to run and a good handful of them are working on something like LIDAR point clouds with a million 3D points in them, plus some cameras running several different image recognition and segmentation algorithms, and you want to have fast cycle times, it just all adds up. Every serious robot I have ever worked on is maxing out its system, even ones at Google X with a full desktop CPU, a high end NVIDIA graphics card, and a couple secondary ARM CPUs.
That definitely helps me understand why the footage of the robots in this video had to be sped up: https://youtu.be/Ybk8hxKeMYQ
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/ukrainian-flees-to-poland-wi...
In general, the purpose of Bitcoin is not to get rich, but to have a currency that is universally accepted and not tied to a political party’s fiscal decisions.
[0] did you know the original snake oils contains more omega-3 and therefore improves cognitive function when compared to lard? I did not. But you can get omega-3 elsewhere, and the people who made the term synonymous with fraud didn't use those snakes, so…
or games. People could have been studying or doing something more important than wasting time and energy. I get that it is entertainment, but so are board games and that don't require mining rare earth minerals or putting pressure on the grid as you can always play board games with candles on.
Or going outside. People could have been studying or doing something more important than wasting time and energy.
Or not being locked in the education facility. People could have been studying or doing something more important than wasting time and energy.
The most ecologically friendly thing you can do is go to sleep. If you want to play games, do it while the sun is out!
(/s, just in case)
That said, gaming is what gave us GPUs (which have developed for gaming over the course of decades) so that we can now utilize them for more interesting and "productive" applications.
So, for me, in the end I'm happy the PC gaming industry and user base has been pushing GPU capability.
What really (finally) more or less killed GPU mining was the Ethereum move to PoS (Proof of Stake).
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use
That's like the average person running 27 NVIDIA A100s at max capacity at all times!
> As for what you should look to invest in?
> I'm sure it's just a coincidence that training neural networks and mining cryptocurrencies are both applications that benefit from very large arrays of GPUs. [...]
> If I was a VC I'd be hiring complexity theory nerds to figure out what areas of research are promising once you have Yottaflops of numerical processing power available, then I'd be placing bets on the GPU manufacturers going there
[1]: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/02/place-y...
With a bunch of people trailling behind with "it kind of works" open alternatives.
It's not so bad. Nvidia could come and say, "hey, I'm going to lock down your GPU so that you can only use it to render polygons in my whitelisted list of video-games, and then you pay us $$$$$$ to buy our 'datacenter' thingy for anything else." But if they do it, people will go and buy the competitor's product.
And yes, probably their 4090 are being bought by some rich kids with their parents' money, but I reckon most of it are sales to professionals, people who would justify their purchase decision with more than playing First-person-shooters. I for example play videogames with my gf, and we have equivalent GPUs. Hers is AMD and costs less than mine, even if it does the same, but I went for Nvidia so that PhysX were available and I could use Pytorch and Numba+GPU and even C++ CUDA. The moment Nvidia locks that down, I'll have to switch to AMD.
You just described gaming consoles.
Good luck with AMD.
If organics is the only factor, I don't know why those wouldn't perform as well as human or ape brain cells.
Meatcubator: https://youtu.be/Z_ZGq8Tah0k
Growing human brain cells: https://youtu.be/V2YDApNRK3g