Not sure why a publicly accessible GPU cluster would be a better solution than the current system of research grants.
The investment was made to build the press, which created significant jobs and capital investment. The press, and others like it, were subsequently operated by and then sold to a private operator, which in turn enabled the massive expansion of both military manufacturing, and commercial aviation and other manufacturing.
The Heavy Press Program was a strategic investment that paid dividends by both advancing the state of the art in manufacturing at the time it was built, and improving manufacturing capacity.
A GPU cluster might not be the correct investment, but a strategic investment in increasing, for example, the availability of training data, or interoperability of tools, or ease of use for building, training, and distributing models would probably pay big dividends.
Would you mind expanding on these options? Universal training data sounds intriguing.
Much of this is already available to private sector entities, but having a publicly funded organization responsible for curating and publishing this would enable new entrants to quickly and easily get a foundation without having to scrape the internet again, especially given how rapidly model generated content is being published.
Admittedly it hasn't been cleaned all that much - you still need to put a bit of effort into that (newer certificates tend to be better quality), but it's very low friction overall. I'd love to see them do this with more datasets
The public is incredibly lazy, though. Don't expect them to do anything until their hand is forced, which doesn't bode well for the action to meet a desirable outcome.
Of all the things to expand the scope of government spending why would they choose AI, or more specifically GPUs?
As for the why... because there's no shortage of capital for AI. It sounds like the government would like to encourage redirecting that capital to something that's good for the economy at large, rather than good for the investors of a handful of Silicon Valley firms interested only in their own short term gains.
If it succeeds, you were ahead of the curve. If it fails, you were prudent enough to fund an investigation early. Either way, bleeding edge tech gives you a W.
None of that changes that there have been major technical breakthroughs, and entire classes of products and services that didn't exist before those investments in NASA (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies for a short list). There are 15 departments and dozens of Agencies that comprise the US Federal government, many of whom make investments in science and technology as part of their mandates, and most of that is delivered through some structure of public-private partnerships.
What you see as over-hyped and over-funded nonsense could be the next ground breaking technology, and that is why we need both elected leaders who (at least in theory) represent the will of the people, and appointed, skilled bureaucrats who provide the elected leaders with the skills, domain expertise, and experience that the winners of the popularity contest probably don't have.
Yep, there will be waste, but at least with public funds there is the appearance of accountability that just doesn't exist with private sector funds.
If it fails certain groups ensure everyone knows the government "wasted" taxpayer money.
Totally agree. That doesn't mean it can't generate massive ROI.
> Govt investment would also drive the cost of GPUs up a great deal
Difficult to say this ex ante. On its own, yes. But it would displace some demand. And it could help boost chip production in the long run.
> Not sure why a publicly accessible GPU cluster would be a better solution than the current system of research grants
Those receiving the grants have to pay a private owner of the GPUs. That gatekeeping might be both problematic, if there is a conflict of interests, and inefficient. (Consider why the government runs its own supercomputers versus contracting everything to Oracle and IBM.)
This way the government pays 2'500 USD per card, not 40'000 USD or whatever absurd.
You want to punish NVIDIA for calling its shots correctly? You don't see the many ways that backfires?
That said, it strikes me that the actual limiting factor is fab capacity not nvidia's designs and we probably need to lift the monopolies preventing competition there if we want to reduce prices.
Why do you think these private entities are willing to invest the massive capital it takes to keep the frontier advancing at that rate?
> I do want to limit the amount we reward NVIDIA for calling the shots correctly to maximize the benefit to society
Why wouldn't NVIDIA be a solid steward of that capital given their track record?
Because whether they make 100x or 200x they make a shitload of money.
> Why wouldn't NVIDIA be a solid steward of that capital given their track record?
The problem isn't who is the steward of the capital. The problem is that economically efficient thing to do for a single company is (given sufficient fab capacity, and a monopoly) to raise prices to extract a greater share of the pie at the expense of shrinking the size of the pie. I'm not worried about who takes the profit, I'm worried about the size of the pie.
It's not a certainty that they 'make a shitload of money'. Reducing the right tail payoffs absolutely reduces the capital allocated to solve problems - many of which are risky bets.
Your solution absolutely decreases capital investment at the margin, this is indisputable and basic economics. Even worse when the taking is not due to some pre-existing law, so companies have to deal with the additional uncertainty of whether & when future people will decide in retrospect that they got too large a payoff and arbitrarily decide to take it from them.
Of course I agree I'm going to stop marginal investments from occurring into research into patent-able technologies by reducing the expect profit. But I'm going to do so very slightly because I'm not shifting the expected value by very much. Meanwhile I'm going to greatly increase the investment into the existing technology we already have, and allow many more people to try to improve upon it, and I'm going to argue the benefits greatly outweigh the costs.
Whether I'm right or wrong about the net benefit, the basic economics here is that there are both costs and benefits to my proposed action.
And yes I'm going to marginally reduce future investments because the same might happen in the future and that reduces expected value. In fact if I was in charge the same would happen in the future. And the trade-off I get for this is that society gets the benefit of the same actually happening in the future and us not being hamstrung by unbreachable monopolies.
You're massively increasing uncertainty.
> the same would happen in the future. And the trade-off I get for this is that society gets the benefit
Why would you expect it would ever happen again? What you want is an unrealized capital gains tax. Not to nuke our semiconductor industry.
I think you're shifting it by a lot. If the government can post-hoc decide to invalidate patents because the holder is getting too successful, you are introducing a substantial impact on expectations and uncertainty. Your action is not taken in a vacuum.
> Meanwhile I'm going to greatly increase the investment into the existing technology we already have, and allow many more people to try to improve upon it, and I'm going to argue the benefits greatly outweigh the costs.
I think this is a much more speculative impact. Why will people even fund the improvements if the government might just decide they've gotten too large a slice of the pie later on down the road?
> the trade-off I get for this is that society gets the benefit of the same actually happening in the future and us not being hamstrung by unbreachable monopolies.
No the trade-off is that materially less is produced. These incentive effects are not small. Take for instance, drug price controls - a similar post-facto taking because we feel that the profits from R&D are too high. Introducing proposed price controls leads to hundreds of fewer drugs over the next decade [0] - and likely millions of premature deaths downstream of these incentive effects. And that's with a policy with a clear path towards short-term upside (cheaper drug prices). Discounted GPUs by invalidating nvidia's patents has a much more tenuous upside and clear downside.
[0]: https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/voices.uchicago.edu/dist/d/312...
Your claim that removing a profit motivation will increase investment is flat out wrong. Everything else crumbles from there.
I do think there are some serious IP issues, as IP rules can be hijacked in the US, but that means you fix those problems, not blow up IP that was rightfully earned
They are leaders in solar and EVs.
Remember how Japan leapfrogged the western car industry, and six sigma became required reading for managers in every industry?
Past performance is not indicative of future results.
Under your idea, we’ll try a badly broken economic philosophy again. And while we’re at it, we will completely stifle investment in innovation.
Lol it's not "monopolies" limiting fab capacity. Existing fab companies can barely manage to stand-up a new fab in different cities. Fabs are impossibly complex and beyond risky to fund.
It's the kind of thing you'd put government money to making but it's so risky government really don't want to spend billions and fail so they give existing companies billions so if they fail it's not the governments fault.
One of the things that the post mentioned was the meager profit margin that the companies made during this time.
But the thing is that this set the America auto and aviation industry up to rule the world for decades.
A government going to a company and saying 'we need you to produce this product for us at a lower margin thab you'd like to' isn't the end of the world.
I don't know if this is one of those scenarios but they exist.
[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-to-build-300000-a...
They are an intellectual property company holding the rights on plans to make graphic cards, not even a company actually making graphic cards.
The government could launch an initiative "OpenGPU" or "OpenAI Accelerator", where the government orders GPUs from TSMC directly, without the middleman.
It may require some tweaking in the law to allow exception to intellectual property for "public interest".
private capital is absolutely the driving force for the vast majority of innovations since the beginning of the 20th century. public capital may be involved, but it is dwarfed by private capital markets.
Private nuclear research is heavily dependent on governmental contracts to function. Solar was subsidized to heck and back for years. Public investment does work, and does make a didference.
I would even say governmental involvement is sometimes even the deciding factor, to determine if research is worth pursuing. Some major capital investors have decided AI models cannot possibly gain enough money to pay for their training costs. So what do we do when we believe something is a net good for society, but isn’t going to be profitable?
Reflexively, I count that harm as a feature. I don't like private capital markets because I've been screwed by private capital on multiple occasions.
But you are right: I don't understand how these actions would harm. So please do expand your concerns.
20-25 year old drugs are a lot more useful than 20-25 year old GPUs, and the manufacturing supply chain is not a bottleneck.
There's no generics for the latest and greatest drugs, and a fancy gene therapy might run a lot more than $40k.
Along similar lines, I'm trying to build a developer credits program where I get whomever (AMD/Dell) to purchase credits on my super computers, that we then give away to developers to build solutions, which drives more demand for our hardware, and we commit to re-invest those credits back into more hardware. The idea is to create a win-win-win (us, them, you) developer flywheel ecosystem. It isn't a new idea at all, Nvidia and hyperscalers have been doing this for ages.
You mean a better solution than different teams paying AWS over and over, potentially spending 10x on rent rather than using all that cash as a down payment on actually owning hardware? I can't really speak for the total costs of depreciation/hardware maintenance but renting forever isn't usually a great alternative to buying.