Nvidia CEO says nations seeking own AI systems will raise demand | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia CEO says nations seeking own AI systems will raise demand

bloomberg.com

50 pointsmfiguiere27 comments

So does this mean Nvidia will become a 2T or 3T company soon? Time to buy stocks I guess.

That is what Nvidia would like you to think and is exactly why their CEO said it.

Wouldn't this also means the demand from cloud providers will go down and creates a balance?

I would assume these are entirely net new use cases. I also don’t know why this wouldn’t be developed in localized cloud regions. Aws, for instance, running in India is locally compliant with regulations. It’s cheaper for aws to comply with Indian regulations than it is for a random company, or worse a government, to build aws from whole cloth in India (nothing here is specific to India, just used as an example).

Before anyone steps in in favor of on prem vs aws, I’ve worked at cloud providers, building megacorp on prem, and migrating said on prem to the cloud, and building native cloud companies. Execution risks and the enormous high energy state of building full service on prem solutions make it much more reasonable to use cloud providers for stuff like this, and the economics of capital investment, the accounting of things, etc, makes it unreasonable for governments to NOT use cloud providers.

That’s only if there is an overlap between the customers who want to use cloud and the ones who want to run things on premise.

I would assume that those who want to run things on prem aren’t currently cloud customers for other services. And those who are already heavily invested in a cloud provider will look to the same provider for AI compute.

Only if it’s not already priced in.

> Nations including India, Japan, France and Canada are talking about the importance of investing in “sovereign AI capabilities,” Huang said in an interview Thursday with Bloomberg Television. “Their natural resource – data – should be refined and produced for their country. The recognition of sovereign AI capabilities is global.”

Data as a natural resource is an interesting analogy. Especially if you frame it in the category of nuclear fissile material.

But why would we do that? Nuclear fissile material is noted for its ability to be formed into weapons that generate dangerous explosions and substances both acutely and chronically hazardous to human life, increasing cancer risk.

This is not a particularly obvious analogy to “data”.

I expect you could learn a lot of things from an open data feed into another country's population.

The TikTok fears are limited to capturing like/don't-like.

Generalize that to the massive amount of data streaming between cloud models and back?

The analogy is the costs and risks of storage. Data might not cause cancer if you stand next to it, but there’s plenty of risks involved in mass accumulation of data controlled by government entities. And anything that gives more incentive for that accumulation, like being able to run in house ML models, will surely lead to even more accumulation.

Sounds like this is an analogy better served by nuclear waste than by fissile material.

"This is not a particularly obvious analogy to “data”."

Future ASI being dangerous is very feasible. For arguments, see LessWrong or Bostrom's work.

It is no coincidence that EleutherAI named their pretraining dataset "the Pile"

I think AI training presents quite a nice opportunity for states like Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas (plenty of available land for solar power plants, many sunny days, few rainy ones, nights not that long in the winter). Mexico and Australia are also very well positioned.

Data centers use a lot of water though, don't they?

A hyperscale (cloud) datacenter uses about 2000 m3 of water per day [1]. That sounds like a lot, without any frame of reference. But if we compare with the average golf course in the South-West, that uses 459 acre-feet of water per year ([2], Table 2) which comes to 1550 m3 of water per day. There are more than 200 golf courses in the South West. You can draw your own conclusions.

[1] https://dgtlinfra.com/data-center-water-usage/

[2]https://usgatero.msu.edu/v11/216335.pdf

ai is a national defense industry and every major country would like their own if they can afford it. just like energy, defense, space, telecom, etc. ai might have a cheaper barrier to entry (for now) than the others

I wonder what percentage of Nvidia’s engineers would have strong feelings about working in the defense sector.

Are they not for defending their family? It looks like a dangerous world out there right now...

Regardless of our particular feelings about working in the defense industry, it is well known that this is a topic that many people have strong feeling about (I intentionally didn’t state my feeling on the matter, because I know this is a basic right-and-wrong issue for people who’ve thought seriously about it, so I’m not going to try and make an argument based on my biases there).

Nvidia’s engineers are at the top of their field and have chosen not to work directly in that field at least, so I’d expect the company to have a higher than average density of folks who are opposed to it.

The "Defense Sector" is not about defense, it is about war and hawking it.

Tell that to the Ukrainians...

The money is so good, only a small fraction would care.

Defense money is good? One of my reasons for leaving was the below average compensation coupled with a mountain of extra bureaucracy.

Well, not the same defense money he is talking about.

where was the BLOOM model built? how long ago did they start?

These seems less like information and more like news with a market agenda.

I expect political parties will build their own AIs and only make them avaialable to donors.

I need to save a few thousand dollars for the US Libertarian Party and the EU Pirate Party.

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