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Comment by emporas | Hacker News Reader

>If anything, this post suggests Nvidia has a long supremacy ahead.

I don't know what you mean by long supremacy, later you mention decades, but Nvidia's huge market share will last for 5 years, 7 years max.

As soon as the computation has to not be absolutely accurate, but it has to approximate a very good solution of a large volume of data in a second, then biology is already great at that. Silicon chips are orders of magnitude worse, in energy consumption as well as the speed of the approximation, let alone the fact they overheat.

In my view, silicon is on it's way out, for use cases like that.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zinnialee/2023/06/21/cortical-l...

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It is unlikely any biology-based computers are going to supplant any real computers any time soon (decades). Keeping a bunch of cells alive to run computations is simply a terrible approach and there's no way they would get close enough to the incumbents to produce something competitive without spending billions on R&D that the chip industry already spent decades ago.

Most computations we do are already approximate, not exact. Most of modern ML is approximate.

If biology based computers are so impractical, then parent and you are correct. Nvidia will hold a big market share for a decade at least, probably more.

I have a different opinion. Cells connected to silicon, even if they are short-lived compared to pure metal to some weeks maybe, the cost may easily outweigh the downsides.

Think about headsets for V.R. for a minute. Headsets which overheat, have fans on them, and are heavy are a big problem for carrying them around for hours. What's the alternative? A cord connected to a PC. That's very cumbersome as well.

Have you worked with cells before? I've worked with cells before and I struggle to see how you could implement a production cell-based computer that was cost-competitive.

No i haven't worked with cells, but the person who implemented the cells-silicon computer of Cortica claims to be a doctor and have figured it out somehow. I don't know what the limits of such product would be, but cell's death would be one of the limits for sure. There may be some more insurmountable problems with such technology, that i have no idea about.

What i do know, if a technology like that exists, it has certain markets which is a better fit, than pure silicon. Anything wearable for example. V.R. headset is just one wearable device which comes to mind.

Growing eukaryotic cells is still something that needs well-outfitted research labs; it's not something you can do in a production computing environment.

You're being misled by news filtered through the VC reality distortion field.

Even if there are markets that fit, these players still ahve replace incumbents with billions of dollars of R&D investment and decades of production deployments. You'd have to pour many billions into establishing a foothold... in a low-profit business.

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