I remember when GLSL was being proposed and there was a lot of debate about how General Purpose it should be. Would people run non-graphical shaders on their GPUs? Yup.
Nvidia should enjoy this period while it lasts. I fail to see any future where custom ASICs don't each their lunch.<p>There's so much opportunity for custom silicon to massively improve compute-per-watt -- for both for training and inference. Nvidia got lucky with their high-memory GPUs being early to this space, but the usefulness of that architecture has already peaked.
“Employee demographics are “diverse,” sort of—I would guess, based on a visual survey of the cafeteria at lunchtime, that about a third of the staff is South Asian, a third is East Asian, and a third is white.”<p>This part of the article bothered me. Why was diverse placed in quotation marks? Aren’t South Asians and East Asians considered minorities?<p>Also South Asians are a very diverse group in it itself. As are East Asians. Many different languages and cultures….<p>So why was diverse in quotation marks? Why did the author say “sort of”???
> In May, hundreds of industry leaders endorsed a statement that equated the risk of runaway A.I. with that of nuclear war. Huang didn’t sign it. Some economists have observed that the Industrial Revolution led to a relative decline in the global population of horses, and have wondered if A.I. might do the same to humans. “Horses have limited career options,” Huang said. “For example, horses can’t type.” As he finished eating, I expressed my concerns that, someday soon, I would feed my notes from our conversation into an intelligence engine, then watch as it produced structured, superior prose. Huang didn’t dismiss this possibility, but he assured me that I had a few years before my John Henry moment. “It will come for the fiction writers first,” he said. Then he tipped the waitress a thousand dollars, and stood up to accept his award.<p>If you ever wondered if you had what it took to be a NYer writer, consider if you could have provoked & recorded this vignette.
I'm an Nvidia fanboy, but the lack of competition they have right now is concerning. Without competition, the prices of computing will stop going down, which means only big players would be able to play. It means that most of the economy will be cut off from most of the benefits of AI[^1].<p>[^1] That could be a good thing if our AIs are destined to replace us...it means it will take longer, because the AIs will have to pay very high taxes to NVIDIA[^2].<p>[^2] Or to the AIs in control of NVIDIA.