Dell building an AI factory with Nvidia | Hacker News Reader

Dell building an AI factory with Nvidia

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28 pointsryzvonusef26 comments

That PR department probably did some hefty overtime to rebrand datacentres as AI factories… what the actual fuck.

It worked for machine learning when it got rebranded to AI.

I'd say I'm keen for this hype to die down but I'm sure the next one will irk me just as much if not more...

I'm not familiar with anyone confusing or intentionally conflating the two. From my perspective, it seems that AI still is what it has always been - computer systems set up to perform complex tasks that historically only people could do, whether internally they're based on ML or expert systems, or anything else.

I can assure that among the many millions using ChatGPT, only a small minority can make that distinction. Most people draw a straight line from LLMs to AGI, but can't tell you how we're supposed to get there.

For them, CGPT is sufficiently advanced (opaque) enough to be indistinguishable from magic. And for them, going from CGPT to robot servants and auto-driving cars is but a mere extension of said magic.

Nah, pretty much everything's getting rebranded as "AI" now. Now, mind you, "ML" was itself largely a rebranding of things which were branded as "AI" prior to the last AI winter; "ML", in the imagination of the PR department, has never been all _that_ well-defined.

https://x.com/EdLudlow/status/1803752178764640357

    > $DELL +3% in premarket. $SMCI +4.5% in premarket.

I mean, if it works...

Jensen: “every company will be an AI factory and utilize NIMS to accelerate development”

Translation without the marketing BS: “every company will fine tune some models and serve them via a containerized serverless deployment”

I guess Nvidia's stock will increase higher due to various vendors like Dell trying to enter the AI business.

https://x.com/MichaelDell/status/1803385185984974941

    > We’re building a Dell AI factory with @nvidia to power @grok for @xai @elonmusk

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1803429159005241780

    > To be precise, Dell is assembling half of the racks that are going into the supercomputer that xAI is building

Dell is in the AI biz now? HP and Lenovo when?

Capitalizing on all the trendy things: nVidia, AI, factory; leveraging Elon Musk.

I mean, atleast server racks are not a bubble, I guess.

> Dell is in the AI biz now?

No more so than the concrete contractor that poured the slab the datacenter is built on, it sounds like.

Concrete is revolutionizing the AI industry by making sure our robots have a solid foundation to stand on.

For what it's worth, I recall a talk by someone at Google, probably about a decade ago, saying that their bottleneck for scaling compute was literally how long it takes to pour concrete for new data centers. I suppose that might have been an exaggeration, but it stuck with me.

I wonder if it would be quicker to acquire existing centers or warehouses.

They still will need a lot of materials for adapting those buildings for higher cooling and power needs.

It would all come down to the Cost Benefit Analysis, whether retrofitting an e.g. unused warehouse or misc. industrial space to be a datacenter would be more cost effective/time efficient than a brand new building with all the general civil construction & site work that would entail before you even have four walls and a roof.

Surely concrete is going to be hell of a constraint for both compute (datacenters) and power for said compute (power plants).

And also expect for higher water usage. Interesting times ahead.

It’s in the server assembly business

What does an ai factory produce?

Will they will train AIs there, or if they will inference AIs there?

... Oh, an "AI factory" is a _datacenter_. I initially assumed we were talking hyping up industrial robotics.

Dell should possibly consider hiring some better marketing people.

https://x.com/EdLudlow/status/1803758922182107556

    >What is an AI Factory?

    >Here's how @MichaelDell defined it when we spoke in Las Vegas in May:

    >"An ai factory is really a supply chain that creates intelligence. So if you think about a traditional factory, right, you've got all these ingredients and we know a lot about supply chains. It's kind of what we do, but think about it as a supply chain to create intelligence inside your company. And to do that. It all starts with data, right? If you have no data, you have no A.I., right? If you have bad data, you have bad A.I. So you've got to organize your data. It's something we know a lot about because data equals storage and we store more data than anybody in the world. If you start with the data and then, you know, you, you get into the ecosystem of all the software and the models that you're hearing about, small and large models, the retrieval augmented generation. And of course, it's not just GPUs, it's also the networking and the storage and the memory that come together."

    >https://youtube.com/watch?v=HcOhAvWF0cc

Couldn't be less clear if he tried.

Now that Apple has their model, will all the name brand PC assemblers/makers will start adding "their" AIs as selling points?

Will Dell add accelerators to all their PCs and laptops that run Grok and advertise that you need a Dell because it runs Grok?

I was wrong in my guesses.

More information is available here: https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/20/musk_dell_supermicro_...

Dell and SuperMicro are building this for X.

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