numbers_guy

"Christian nationalist" is a term that on the one hand, insults Christians, and on the other hand flatters these power hungry grifters. Why would you use such a term?

There is obviously a huge difference between fascist-aspiring westerners and communist-aspiring westerners. It's disingenuous to pretend otherwise. Tankies are crazy and I don't approve of their ideology, but they also do not dehumanize large swaths of the population.

> and communists

Communists left the chat in 1989, grandpa. There are multiple factions competing for power but communists aren't really in the ring right now. It's mostly different flavours of establishment factions and alt-right factions.

AlexNet was only released in 2011. The progress made in just 14 years has been insane. So while I do agree that we are approaching a "back to the drawing board" era, calling the past 14 years a "failure" is just not right.

If NVIDIA is blocked in China and China keeps developing AI models of comparable quality using home grown chips, it puts into question the dominance of NVIDIA in the market. If NVIDIA is allowed to continue operating in China, it doesn't matter much if China actually uses NVIDIA or Huawei, as long as there is some plausible deniability that China is using NVIDIA powered clusters for their strongest models.

There are a few "optimization startups". But in this context I find it a bit ironic that pretty much everyone is working with the same architecture, and the same hardware for the most part, so actually there isn't really that much demand for bespoke optimizations.

> When I look around, I see hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on hardware – GPUs, data centers, and power stations. What I don’t see are people waving large checks at ML infrastructure engineers like me and my team.

That doesn't seem to be the case to me. I guess the author wants to do everything on his own terms and maybe companies aren't interested in that.

Does anyone know why they brand it an "inference chip"? Is it something at the hardware level that makes is unsuitable for training, or is it simply that the toolchain for training is massively more complicated to program?

Nothing in principle. But Huang probably doesn't believe in hyper specializing their chips at this stage because it's unlikely that the compute demands of 2035 are something we can predict today. For a counterpoint, Jim Keller took Tenstorrent in the opposite direction. Their chips are also very efficient, but even more general purpose than NVIDIA chips.

European countries are willing to make big bets. The issue is with incompetent leadership. For example they made very big bets on quantum computing and particle accelerators for HEP, both of which have close to zero ROI. Meanwhile, up till very recently AI was sneered at as not "scientific" enough. This is a problem with leadership. The issue is mostly that we put people in leadership positions, who are experts in past technologies but those instincts do not translate well to present technologies.

IQ by its own is not enough. A higher than average IQ is probably the result of a larger than average working memory, and maybe also some ability to make more "long-range" connections between concepts in the brain. That's raw processing power. But raw processing power isn't everything. You also need an otherwise healthy mind, the sustained motivation to accomplish great things and the ability to focus to dedicate enough time towards those goals.

For example if you read the biography of Von Neumann, it's remarkable that he was able to focus and work in the most noisy and distracting environments.

They provide containers to cater to those needs: https://catalog.ngc.nvidia.com/search

> however simultaneously are unaware that the cushy "European" lifestyle they love only exists because of the US

Why do so many Americans believe this? I would like to see some real accounting of the US-EU relationship. Americans only focus on the supposed defense relationship, where supposedly the EU is under investing because the US will supposedly come to the rescue. Every single other aspect of the US-EU relationship is ignored.

This is the chief reason I don't use integrations. I just use chat, because I want to physically understand and insert code myself. Else you end up with the code overtaking your understanding of it.

> This technology demos incredibly well

You just summed up machine learning, not just AI/LLMs. My domain is very far from LLMs, but even in my domain, you can build a really cool demo, that is entirely misleading.

Interesting. I am experimenting with different ML ecosystems and wasn't really considering Julia at all but I put it on the list now.

What makes Julia "great" for ML?

There is nowhere to run and hide. Europe is worse than the US on this front. China also demands party loyalty. In a sense this is just the human condition. The ruling faction demands loyalty. Only a very advanced human civilization could move past that and allow criticism of the ruling class. Maybe the US had achieved that for a brief movement in the past or maybe it was just an illusion.

EDIT: For people wondering why I think it's worse in Europe, it's because in Europe the ruling class and the universities are on the same side. And when I say Europe, I mean UK, France and Germany.

No the Pope is not infallible and you can disagree with the Pope. Sure. But you cannot use that as a cop out to turn Catholicism into an arbitrary Protestant sect where you make up moral values as you go based on your political inclinations. The whole point of Catholicism is that you have a whole institution whose job it is to guide the Church. If you believe you know better than the clergy on every single topic, you are by definition a Protestant. Lots of these Protesting Catholics have worldviews that are entirely incompatible with the fundamentals of Catholicism, but they do not want to drop the Catholic aesthetic, because it gives them an air of superiority over their fellow Protestants which they look down upon.

If you look at my other posts, I acknowledge this and I am only replying to posts who pretend to speak for the whole worldwide Church.

Said political inclinations were written in the Catechism before any of us knew who Pope Francis was.

Please stop talking in such general terms. No Catholics I know have been shaken by anything Pope Francis did. I have been educated in a Catholic school, which also served as a Catholic seminary, and I never heard Pope Francis say anything that was not in line with the catechism that we were taught back then.

That female clergy is only a thing in dead Protestant churches exactly illustrates my point.

The real (non theological) reason why women are not allowed to be priests is because if you take a random mass of humans and you let them elect a leader, in 100% of the cases that leader will be a man. So don't blame Catholics for the faults of humanity.

Only American Protesting Catholics had issues with him. The same ones that post Deus Vult memes on Facebook.

Since I see a lot of people commenting on this topic, I would like to offer a different perspective.

Pope JPII was for my southern European social democratic Catholic family much more polarizing than Pope Francis. Pope Francis had politics that are mainstream and not at all controversial in my part of the world. Whereas JPII was perceived as the guy who was buddies with Reagan and Bush and a general supporter of American foreign policy. To what extent that was a fair assessment, I do not want to comment, since he did try to speak against the invasion of Iraq.

None the less, it is not true that Pope Francis is more popular with non-Catholics (Reagan, Bush and most of the US were not Catholic and big supporters of JPII). It was also JPII that started the interfaith dialogue. It is also not true that Pope Francis is unpopular with Catholics.

There are Catholics all across the globe with vastly different opinions on all kinds of issues.

I guess the author is mentioning public funding to try to make a political point, but it does not fit the narrative, because publicly funded research is the norm worldwide.

The glaring difference in how the US approached R&D is rather the way in which they manage to integrate the private sector, manage to convert research into products and manage to get funded for these rather risky private projects.

Also, with regards to why researchers flocked to the US, post-WWII, it was for the same reason that other people were flocking to the US (and Canada, and Australia): the new world had good economic prospects.

"Caught us" implies that the capitalists, the people who own the manufacturing plants, did something immoral, or illegal or under handed, but in the economic system that everyone championed in America, especially at that time, this was simply allowed. Seems like the fundamental anger is about the injustice of the economic system that leads to such consequences.

I would not necessarily say that the envy is unjustified. If you live in a rich country you ideally want all citizens to become wealthy. Else, irrespective of income, you will be lorded over by those who are magnitudes richer than you.

Question: if the jobs were off shored, but the resulting profits were shared more equally, would Americans still complain?