Thread

1. stult · 1790021389 · focus · HN ↗

   I have generally been bullish on data centers independent of how AI demand/load evolves. People will find a way to use that compute, even if it isn't the precise use we expect. As scale increases and the price per computation comes down, we will be able to brute force solutions to problems that otherwise would be intractable or prohibitively expensive to solve. And there are effectively an infinite set of those problems.

   This tracks the evolution of how we use cloud computing and GPUs over the last 20 years. Cloud computing was originally just about saving companies from needing to maintain their own server racks, but has unlocked previously unserviced demand by allowing people to build an app or service and scale it to meet rapidly rising use without needing to invest a ton upfront in hardware. Suddenly a hobbyist could spin something up in their spare time that previously required many thousands of dollars of investment. Or when someone wants to run a single large scale computation, they can do it without needing to waste capital on maintaining idling servers to meet an occasional demand spike, like when a company I used to work at moved from running atmospheric calculations on a server in a closet to the cloud and were able to achieve double digit accuracy increases with the increased scale, while spending less overall on batch computing jobs.

   GPUs, as the name implies, were created for graphics, and primarily for gaming graphics, but then more or less accidentally ended up enabling the present AI boom, which depends on a scale of computation that would have been impossible with older CPU architectures. Maybe someone at some point predicted this, but I think for the vast majority of people, it was extremely surprising that a niche gaming product would enable an industrial revolution level technological leap forward.

   LLMs are just one way that increased compute scale unlocks seemingly magical results, but they are far from the only example and I have no doubt that there are many unknown examples remaining to be discovered yet.

   1. awfaaetetsg · 1790022025 · focus · HN ↗

      "a niche gaming product would enable an industrial revolution level technological leap forward."

      something has to true to be surprising. your statement is false and nonsese

      1. stult · 1790026576 · focus · HN ↗

         Bullshit. Even if you don't think LLMs alone are enabling that level of advancement, GPUs in general very much are. They are the critical enabling technology underlying self-driving cars, autonomous drones, camera-based robotics controllers, faster/better drug discovery, faster/better modeling protein structure and design, ML weather forecasting, materials discovery, and many other applications.

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