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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

> You can’t sue your way to AGI. We have great respect for Elon’s accomplishments and gratitude for his early contributions to OpenAI, but he should be competing in the marketplace rather than the courtroom.

Isn't that exactly what he's doing with x.ai? Grok and all that? IIRC Elon has the biggest GPU compute cluster in the world right now, and is currently training the next major version of his "competing in the marketplace" product. It will be interesting to see how this blog post ages.

I'm not dismissing the rest of the post (and indeed I think they make a good case on Elon's hypocrisy!) but the above seems at best like a pretty massive blindspot which (if I were invested in OpenAI) would cause me some concern.

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> biggest GPU compute cluster in the world right now

This is wildly untrue, and most in industry know that. Unfortunately you won't have a source just like I won't, but just wanted to voice that you're way off here.

> This is wildly untrue, and most in industry know that. Unfortunately you won't have a source just like I won't, but just wanted to voice that you're way off here.

Sure, we probably can't know for sure who has the biggest as they try to keep that under wraps for competition purposes, but it's definitely not "wildly untrue." A simple search will show that they have if not the biggest, damn near one of the biggest. Just a quick sample:

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/spectrum-x-ethernet-netwo...

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/worlds-fastest-supercomputer-plea...

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/elon-musk-to...

https://www.capacitymedia.com/article/musks-xais-colossus-cl...

i've physically visited a larger one, it is not even a well kept secret. we all see each other at the same airports and hotels.

Because they are all located in the same small town?

Technically, it maybe the world's biggest single AI supercomputer.

But it ignores Amazon, Google and Microsoft/OpenAI being able to run training workloads across their entire clouds.

It is true. [0]

[0] https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/spectrum-x-ethernet-netwo...

Even just Meta dwarfs Twitter's cluster, with an estimated 350k H100s by now.

2 months ago Jensen Huang did an interview where he said xAi built the fastest cluster with 100k GPUs.he said "what they achieved is singular, never been done before" https://youtu.be/bUrCR4jQQg8?si=i0MpcIawMVHmHS2e

Meta said they would expand their infrastructure to include 350k GPUs by the end of this year. But, my guess is they meant a collection of AI clusters not a singular large cluster. In the post where they mentioned this, they shared details on 2 clusters with 24k GPUs each.https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/12/data-center-engineerin...

What's singular is putting 100k H100s in a single machine. Which, yay, cool supercomputer, but the distributed supercomputer with 5 times the machines runs just as fast anyways.

Huang is still a CEO trying to prop up his product. He'd tell you putting an RTX4090 in your bathroom to drive an LED screen mirror is unprecedented if it meant it got him more sales and more clout.

Really? Meta looks to be running larger clusters of Nvidia GPUs already

https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/12/data-center-engineerin...

This doesn't account for inhouse silicon like Google where the comparison becomes less direct (different devices, multiple subgroups like DeepMind)

I don't think you've been paying attention to the industry even though your posturing like an insider.

The distinction is that larger installations cannot form a single network. Before xAI's new network architecture, only around 30k GPUs could train a model simultaneously. It's not clear how many can train together with xAI's new approach, but apparently it is >100k.

It's rich coming from Sam Altman -- the guy who famously tried to use regulatory capture to block everyone else.

Game recognizes game.

> IIRC Elon has the biggest CPU compute cluster in the world right now

Do you have a source for this? I don’t buy this when compared to Google, Amazon, Lawrence Livermore National Lab…

I first heard it on the All-In podcast, but I do see many articles/blogs about it as well. Quick note though, I mistyped CPU (and rapidly caught and fixed, but not fast enough!) when I meant GPU.

[1]: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/worlds-fastest-supercomputer-plea...

The claim seems to mostly be coming fro NVIDIA marketing [0].

[0] https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/spectrum-x-ethernet-netwo...

Surely Meta has the biggest compute in that category, no? I wouldn't be surprised if Elon went around saying that to raise money though.

Maybe Elon is doing both, competing in the marketplace and in the courtroom. And in advising the president to regulate non-profit AI .

Agree, he is doing both. But if he's competing in the marketplace, it seems pretty off base for Open AI to tell him he should be competing in the marketplace. So I think my criticism stands.

I don’t think their suggestion ever implies that he isn’t.

If the believed he already was competing in the marketplace, then what would be the point of saying "he should be competing in the marketplace rather than the courtroom." ? I'm genuinely trying to understand what I'm missing here because it seems illogical to tell someone they should do something they are already doing.

What you are missing is the context of this phrase. It is almost exclusively used when talking about two entities are already competitors.

Some of your confusion may come because this phrase is intended neither as a statement of fact, nor a course of suggested action. It is instead a rhetorical flourish intended to imply that one company has a subpar product and is using the legal system to make up for that.

>Isn't that exactly what he's doing with x.ai? Grok and all that?

They aren't saying he isn't. But he is trying to handicap OpenAI, while his own offering at this point is farcical.

>It will be interesting to see how this blog post ages.

Whether Elon's "dump billions to try to get attention for The Latest Thing" attempt succeeds or not -- the guy has an outrageous appetite to be the center of attention, and sadly people play along -- has zero bearing on the aging of this blog post. Elon could simply be fighting them in the marketplace, instead he's waging a public and legal campaign that honestly makes him look like a pathetic bitch. And that's regardless of my negative feelings regarding OpenAI's bait and switch.

Eh grok is bad but I wouldn't call it farcial. It's terrible at multimodal, but in terms of up to date recent cultural knowledge, sentiments, etc. it's much better than the stale GPT models (even with search added)

> biggest GPU compute cluster in the world right now

Really? I'm really surprised by that. I thought Meta was the one who got the jump on everyone by hoarding H100s. Or did you mean strictly GPUs and not any of the AI specific chips?

Good point, I don't know if it's strictly GPUs or also includes some other AI specific chips.

Nvidia wrote about it: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/spectrum-x-ethernet-netwo...

oh wow. I think your original assertion is correct. Wow. What a crazy arms race.

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