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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

Deepmind gets to work directly with the TPU team to make custom modifications and designs specifically for deepmind projects. They get to make pickaxes that are made exactly for the mine they are working.

Everyone using Nvidia hardware has a lot of overlap in requirements, but they also all have enough architectural differences that they won't be able to match Google.

OpenAI announced they will be designing their own chips, exactly for this reason, but that also becomes another extremely capital intensive investment for them.

This also doesn't get into that Google also already has S-tier dataceters and datacenter construction/management capabilities.

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Isn’t there a suspicion that OpenAI buying custom chips from another Sam Altman venture is just graft? Wasn’t that one of the things that came up when the board tried to out him?

The chips are being done in-house.

It was only brought in-house after the $5,000,000,000,000 self-dealing AI chip venture failed to launch.

Nvidia?

Sam Altman attempted to raise $5Tn for an AI-chip startup

Link? I only know of Rain and they raised <<$1 billion IIRC

Note that I said "attempted". https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-altman-seeks-trillions-of-do...

I think this was to build datacenters

> Deepmind gets to work directly with the TPU team to make custom modifications

You don't think Nvidia has field-service engineers and applications engineers with their big customers? Come on man. There is quite a bit of dialogue between the big players and the chipmaker.

They do, but they need to appease a dozen different teams from a dozen different labs, forcing nvidia to take general approaches and/or dictating approaches and pigeonholing labs into using those methods.

Deepmind can do whatever they want, and get the exact hardware to match it. It's a massive advantage when you can discover a bespoke way of running a filter, and you can get a hardware implementation of it without having to share that with any third parties. If OpenAI takes a new find to Nvidia, everyone else using Nvidia chips gets it too.

This ignores the way it often works: Customer comes to NVDA with a problem and NVDA comes up with a solution. This solution now adds value for every customer.

In your example, if OpenAI makes a massive new find they aren't taking it to NVDA.

Nvidia has the advantage of a broad base of customers that gives it a lot of information on what needs work and it tries to quickly respond to those deficiencies.

>In your example, if OpenAI makes a massive new find they aren't taking it to NVDA.

Right, and therefore they are stuck doing it in software, while google can do it in hardware.

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