NVIDIA CEO Huang urges faster AI development—to make it safer

misk@sopuli.xyz to Technology@lemmy.world – 95 points –
NVIDIA CEO Huang urges faster AI development—to make it safer
goldmansachs.com

Here comes the push.

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LOL! To "make it safer".

No.

It's to increase share value by creating a rush to buy their graphics cards.

Help help! Crypto never took off! Won't someone think of our bottom line!

why do CEOs never say "lets take our time to avoid making mistakes and insure quality"?

Capitalism big number must go up every quarter bullshit. Forces myopic short term decision making and will probably be the death of civilization.

Because that’s boring and doesn’t make good headlines. Not making exciting headlines means share prices stagnate. Taking your time also means that someone else might beat you to the punch. Neither of those things are good for the company’s bottom line or the CEOs business reputation.

Because they are not Miyamoto, helping churn out Zelda and Mario games that feel familiar, yet innovative. 🤌🏻

That's like saying we should all drive faster to help identify shortcomings in traffic signals or vehicle safety features...

Sounds like a flimsy ass false pretense to chase profits. Just my opinion, mind, but that doesn't sound like something someone would posit at face value.

What's silicon valley's favourite saying? Move fast and..make things safer? Close enough.

we should all drive faster to help identify shortcomings in traffic signals or vehicle safety features

american traffic engineers in question

Company making billions of dollars wants to continue making billions of dollars.

"Please buy more of my hardware so nobody finds out how deep in trouble my company is. PLEASE."

Why do you think Nvidia is in trouble?

Their "investments" in their largest customers are showing up as sales volume when they're essentially giving products away. This coming year has four major companies coming to market with deadly serious competition, and the magic money investment in AI scams is drying up very quickly. So, if I was nvidia, doing what Jensen has been up to with the CEO-to-CEO customer meetings to arrange delivery timelines, and royally screwing over his most reliable channel partners, I'd hope with everything I have that the customers I have keep buying needlessly so the bubble never bursts.

"Quick...we need to get everyone to buy our GPU-based bullshit before people figure out FPGA is wildly better"

Dedicated ASIC is where all the hotness lies. Flexibility of FPGA doesn't seem to overcome its overhead for most users. Not sure if it will change when custom ASIC becomes too expensive again, and all the magic money furnaces run out of bills to burn.

ASIC are single purpose at the benefit of potential power efficiency improvements. Not at all useful something like running neutral networks, especially not when they are being retrained and updated.

FPGAs are fully (re)programmable. There's a reason why datacenters don't lease ASIC instances.

Not at all useful something like running neutral networks

Um. lol What? You may want to do your research here, because you're so far off base I don't think you're even playing the right game.

There’s a reason why datacenters don’t lease ASIC instances.

Ok, so you should just go ahead and tell all the ASIC companies then.

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/intel-and-google-collaborate-on-computing-asic-data-centers/

https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/servers/article/33005340/closer-look-metas-custom-asic-for-ai-computing

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7551392

Seriously. You realize that the most successful TPUs in the industry are ASICs, right? And that all the "AI" components in your phone are too? What are you even talking about here?

TPU units are specific to individual model frameworks, and engineers avoid using them for that reason. The most successful adoptions for them so far are vendor locked-in NN Models a la Amazon (Trainium), and Google (Coral), and neither of them has wide adoption since they have limited scopes. The GPU game being flexible in this arena is exactly why companies like OpenAI are struggling to justify the costs in using them over TPUs: it's easy to run up front, but the cost is insane, and TPU is even more expensive in most cases. It's also inflexible should you need to do something like multi-model inference (detection+evaluation+result...etc).

As I said, ASICs are single purpose, so you're stuck running a limited model engine (Tensorflow) and instruction set. They also take a lot of engineering effort to design, so unless you're going all-in on a specific engine and thinking you're going to be good for years, it's short sighted to do so. If you read up, you'll see the most commonly deployed edge boards in the world are...Jetsons.

Enter FPGAs.

FPGAs have speedup improvements for certain things like transcoding and inference in the 2x-5x range for specific workloads, and much higher for ML purposes and in-memory datasets (think Apache Ignite+Arrow workloads), and at a massive reduction in power and cooling, so obviously very attractive for datacenters to put into production. The newer slew of chips out are even reprogrammable "on the fly", meaning a simple context switch and flash can take milliseconds, and multi-purpose workloads can exist in a single application, where this was problematic before.

So unless you've got some articles about the most prescient AI companies currently using GPUs and moving to ASIC, the field is wide open for FPGA, and the datacenter adoption of such says it's the path forward unless Nvidia starts kicking out more efficient devices.

Now ask open AI to type for you what the draw backs of FPGA is. Also the newest slew of chips is using partially charged NAND gates instead of FPGA.

Almost all ASIC being used right now is implementing the basic math functions, activations, etc. and the higher level work is happening in more generalized silicon. You can not get the transistor densities necessary for modern accelerator work in FPGA.

Friend, I do this for a living, and I have no idea why you're even bringing gating into the equation, because it doesn't even matter.

I'm assuming you're a big crypto fan, because that's about all I could say of ASIC in an HPC type of environment to be good for. Companies who pay the insane amounts of money for "AI" right now want a CHEAP solution, and ASIC is the most short-term, e-wastey, inflexible solve to that problem. When you get a job in the industry and understand the different vectors, let's talk. Otherwise, you're just spouting junk.

I’m assuming you’re a big crypto fan

Swing and a miss.

because that’s about all I could say of ASIC in an HPC type of environment to be good for

Really? Gee, I think switching fabrics might have a thing to tell you. For someone that does this for a living, to not know the extremely common places that ASICs are used is a bit of a shock.

want a CHEAP solution

Yeah, I already covered that in my initial comment, thanks for repeating my idea back to me.

and ASIC is the most short-term

Literally being atabled to the Intel tiles in Sapphire Rapids and beyond. Used in every switch, network card, and millions of other devices. Every accelerator you can list is an ASIC. Shit, I've got a Xilinx Alveo 30 in my basement at home. But yeah, because you can get an FPGA instance in AWS, you think you know that ASICs aren't used. lmao

e-wastey

I've got bad news for you about ML as a whole.

inflexible

Sometimes the flexibility of a device's application isn't the device itself, but how it's used. Again, if I can do thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of integer operations in a tenth of the power, and a tenth of the clock cycles, then load those results into a segment of activation functions that can do the same, and all I have to do is move this data with HBM and perhaps add some cheap ARM cores, bridge all of this into a single SoC product, and sell them on the open market, well then I've created every single modern ARM product that has ML acceleration. And also nvidia's latest products.

Woops.

When you get a job in the industry

I've been a hardware engineer for longer than you've been alive, most likely. I built my first FPGA product in the 90s. I strongly suspect you just found this hammer and don't actually know what the market as a whole entails, let alone the long LONG history of all of these things.

Do look up ASICs in switching, BTW. You might learn something.

Let's just shut this down right now. If you built FPGAs ever, it was in college in the 90s, at an awful program of a US university that trained you in SQL on the side and had zero idea of how hardware works. I'm sorry for that.

The world has changed since 30 years ago, and the future of integer operations is in reprogrammable chips. All the benefit of a fab chip, and none of the downside in a cloud environment.

The very idea that you think all these companies are looking to design and build their own single purpose chips for things like inference shows you have zero idea of where the industry is headed.

You're only describing how ASIC is used in switches, cool. That's what it's meant for. That's not how general use computing works in the world anymore, buddy. It's never going to be a co-proc in a laptop that can load models and do general inference, or be a useful function for localized NN. It's simply for the single purpose uses as you said.

I mean, you're such an absolute know-nothing that it's hilarious. Nice xenophobic bullshit sprinkled in too. Sorry, no university for me, let alone FPGA in university in the 90s. When my friends were in university they were still spending their time learn Java.

The world has changed since 30 years ago

Indeed. And people like me have been there every step of the way. Your ageism is showing.

and the future of integer operations is in reprogrammable chips

Yes, I remember hearing this exact sentiment 30 years ago. Right around the time we were hearing (again) how neural networks were going to take over the world. People like you are a dime a dozen and end up learning their lessons in a painfully humbling experience. Good luck with that, I hope you take it for the lesson it is.

All the benefit of a fab chip

Except the amount of wasted energy, and extreme amount of logic necessary to make it actually work. You know. The very fucking problem everybody's working hard to address.

The very idea that you think all these companies are looking to design and build their own single purpose chips

The very idea that you haven't kept up with the industry and how many companies have developed their own silicon is laugh out loud comedy to me. Hahahaha. TSMC has some news for you.

You’re only describing how ASIC is used in switches

Nope, I actually described how they are used in SoCs, not in switching fabrics.

That’s not how general use computing works in the world anymore, buddy

Except all those Intel processors I mentioned, those ARM chips in your iPhones and Pixels, the ARM processors in your macbooks. You know. Real nobodies in the industry.

It’s never going to be a co-proc in a laptop that can load models and do general inference, or be a useful function for localized NN.

Intel has news for you. It's impressive how in touch you pretend to be in "the industry" but how little you seem to know about actual products being actually sold today.

Hey, quick question. Does nvidia have FPGAs in their GPUs? No? Hmm. Is the H100 just a huge set of FPGA? No? Oh, weird. I wonder why, since you in all your genuis has said that's the way everybody's going. Strange that their entire product roadmap shows zero FPGA on their DPUs, GPUs, or on their soon to arrive SoCs. You should call Jensen, I bet he has so much to learn from a know-it-all like you that has some amazing ideas about US universities. Hey, where is it that all these tech startup CEOs went to university?

Tell you what. Don't bother responding, nothing you've said holds any water or value.

Aaand we're back on Reddit again...

They can be a xenophobic, ageist jagoff all they want. I'm not engaging with them anymore. They're the carpenter that thinks a hammer solves all problems, if we pretend they actually did anything with FPGA as their day job.

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Because literally everyone else saw the writing on the wall and is preparing FPGA chips EXCEPT for NVIDIA. 🤦

NVidia is just now trying to make their own ARM chips ffs. 5 years late. You're dated and outmoded. Get with the future.

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You're such a dick for no reason. It definitely bolsters your claims your an old school tech guy lol

Not for no reason. They made claims, I provided links, they whined about it. They provided zero links backing up their 40 year old claim that FPGA would replace anything that didn't run away fast enough.

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I guess we’re just waiting until something awful happens before it’s properly regulated.

Not surprising.

Nvidia has pissed off the pc gaming industry, which is why their focus has shifted to the server markets.

Now in the server markets they're not top dog, so they want to straddle the fence.

This divided focus will be their undoing.

Nvidia is top dog in machine learning accelerator / server market which is why they have neglected GPU market. They just want more.

If their winning position was truly "top dog" they wouldn't be shivering, shaking and pissing themselves begging for people to purchase their crap using insane lines like "The more you buy the more you save."

This is total and complete panic.

They do not appear to be in any trouble:

This is precisely why they're panicked. They've just had record stock numbers, record income, record everything. This system depends on constant growth. They need to keep that growth going or the shareholders will pull out, and it will cause their stock to crash.

This all built up just like the Crypto-Rush of 2020-2021. Which you can see in the chart. It went up, peaked, and then dropped when crypto crashed. They're betting big on AI, when it turns out AI isn't as profitable as they thought it would be, it will crash also.

You seem to change narrative / move goalposts with every response.

Nvidia is okay, nobody expects another 1000% stock price increase. Crypto mania is a faint memory when looking at the profits from ML. They can't keep up with demand to the point of partially dropping some market segments. Their customers will keep gobbling up hardware for foreseeable future because there are legitimate uses for it and data scientists / engineers will keep processing larger and larger datasets.

If anything, they're likely scared of competition from big tech players doing custom chips. Amazon, Google, Microsoft all sell cloud computing resources and already do own sillicon design. They're definitely looking to have piece of that "AI" pie too.

Nvidia puts out sleazy statements like the one I've linked to nudge regulators to make that pie even bigger.

A top dog position is a slow & steady growth or consistent government backing. Sharp growths like they have been having consistently lead to crashes. They don't need to even have a loss, they just need to under-perform for their next quarterly projections.

My pointing out cryptomania was not for the fact that Crypto is why they failed. It's that Crypto gave them market boost, followed by a crash when crypto began to crash. This crash wasn't explicitly because crypto crashed, it was because their projects weren't met as a result of crypto's crash. Crypto doesn't need to be involved for their projections to falter. They can be ahead, and be winning the game today. But that doesn't make them Top dog. Top dog is stable, top dog doesn't sit at the precipice of another crash.

Their entire system is built upon pump & dump style investments as a result of the crypto era. They chase quick and easy money. But every time it results in a steep crash afterward. This will be their undoing because this will hurt their reputation, as it already has. The quest for more money, comes at the expense of everything else.

Top dog doesn't need to worry about reputation in the long run, because they'll maintain their place in the long run. An aware front runner will make note of their position and act accordingly. Nvidia is a front runner, planning like a top dog, acting like a top dog.

They are panicked, because they're not Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM or Oracle. They don't have a decades long presence in the economy that if they go under, everyone goes down with them.

These top dogs don't even need to worry about their stocks because they will get bailed out. Nvidia is banking on the idea that they're just as needed. But if they really were just as needed, they wouldn't have to peacock or nudge. They'd just have to threaten that they're going to go under, and governments would panic in fear of an economic collapse.

This is a gamble, and one they will lose. Their decision to divide their position and go after lottery tickets, both in the stock market and in regulations will be their undoing.

If they were needed, they wouldn't have any need to look needed.