And even now, they seem to be surprisingly reluctant to make major commitments to TSMC to ensure a big rampup of B100s and later. As I understand it, TSMC is extremely risk-averse and won’t expand as much as it could unless customers underwrite it in advance so that they can’t lose, and still thinks that AI is some sort of fad like cryptocurrencies that will go bust soon; this makes sense because that sort of deeply-hardwired conservatism is what it takes to survive the semiconductor boom-bust and gambler’s ruin and be one of the last chip fabs left standing.
Giving away free hardware vs extremely risk averse seems mildly contradictory, but I will assume you mean in actual magnitudes. Paying TSMC to drop everything and make only B100s is yeah, a big gamble they probably won’t make since it would cost billions, while a few free cards is nothing.
So that will slow the ramp down a little bit? Would it have mattered? 2012 era compute would be ~16 times slower per dollar, or more if we factor in lacking optimizations, transformer hasn’t been invented so less efficient networks would be used, etc.
The “it could just be another crypto bubble” is an understandable conclusion. Remember, GPT-4 requires a small fee to even use, and for the kind of senior people who work at chip companies, many of them haven’t even tried it.
You have seen the below, right? To me this looks like a pretty clear signal as to what the market wants regarding AI...
Giving away free hardware vs extremely risk averse seems mildly contradictory, but I will assume you mean in actual magnitudes. Paying TSMC to drop everything and make only B100s is yeah, a big gamble they probably won’t make since it would cost billions, while a few free cards is nothing.
So that will slow the ramp down a little bit? Would it have mattered? 2012 era compute would be ~16 times slower per dollar, or more if we factor in lacking optimizations, transformer hasn’t been invented so less efficient networks would be used, etc.
The “it could just be another crypto bubble” is an understandable conclusion. Remember, GPT-4 requires a small fee to even use, and for the kind of senior people who work at chip companies, many of them haven’t even tried it.
You have seen the below, right? To me this looks like a pretty clear signal as to what the market wants regarding AI...