OpenAI is walking away from expanding its Stargate data center with Oracle

E.g. the next gen might have hardware inference for lower bits, more memory bandwidth, etc.

"Those things are still flying! Introduced in 1955!"

"But that was the B version, all those that are still flying are the H version, so many iterations between them!"

"Welcome to 1962"

The efficiency is in other areas too e.g. memory, network, etc. It's TOTAL.

> Here's a synthethic benchmark page listing every GPU in recent memory

We don't have the GPU gains not because of process nodes. Nvidia and later AMD stopped investing in that direction. They started optimizing for AI not graphics.

It's like setting up a warehouse of GPUs to mine bitcoin while others are switching to ASICs.

If the hardware refresh rate makes a substantial share of data center cost function more like opex than capex, the companies funding it out of operations (especially from operations of what are essentially monopoly businesses, in the sense pricing power), even if it isn’t the operations it power specifically, are fine in the near-to-intemediate term (barring exogenous shocks to those other businesses), whereas Oracle, funding it by a debt bonanza, is in a different position.

Nepo baby is coming with a political angle and wants control of the news media part of WB. The American media landscape is already without much competition nor diversity in political views, now there would practically be none.

Reminder to lay up your treasures in heaven.

That's not how any of this works. "Too big to fail" can be applied to companies, but I don't know of any examples of it being applied to people.

This is plainly false. There are plenty of example, even recently, of billionaires losing their fortunes or going bankrupt. Often they come with criminal prosecution because they get desperate and try illegal ways to hang on to their wealth. Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, and several other examples come to mind.

There are a lot of stories of billionaires getting too risky with their investments or too concentrated in businesses and losing the majority of their wealth. The Barclay story, Jim Justice, the old Peloton CEO.

It’s not a common outcome because you have to try hard to screw up that badly when you have over a billion dollars in wealth. Parking it anywhere in common investments would leave you and your ancestors set forever.

Haven't been following Bryan Johnson, eh?

Some of the reason for the high density is that you need devices physically close to each other to share such bandwidth. It’s not because we’re limited by the physical building space, because we can construct buildings all day long. Sending bits around at ultra high speed is hard and you need to keep all of the devices physically close to avoid having your interconnect costs explode.

To use the hit HBO TV show silicon valley analogy, it is far more likely that "the bear is sticky with honey" will happen at Oracle than at Open AI. Some kind of game of telephone gone wrong at some point and now the people responsible at Oracle must double down in order to kick the can to the next quarter and not appear clueless.

Statutory disclaimer: I am not affiliated with either Open AI or Oracle and have no insider information. All of this is mere conjecture and has no basis in reality.

Don't forget the possibility that it's AI slop.

That sounds about right.

> People at openai are lying to cnbc?

Remove "to cnbc" and that's a yes.

> cnbc are fabricating stories while drunk?

Maybe not drunk but likely high.

That's exactly the point.

Performance/watt is increasing so much gen-to-gen that it makes no longer sense to run older hardware.

Not my words, Jensen's.

There are PCIe versions of these right? And another comment is saying there are PCI adapters too. It "only" requires 600 to 700W. It's not out of reach for everybody.

If the used regular server market is any indication, you can find, after a few years, a lot of enterprise gear at totally discounted prices. CPU costing $4K brand new for $100 after a few years: stuff like that.

A friend has got a 42U rack and so do some homelab'ers. People have been running GPU farms mining cryptocurrencies or doing "transcoding" (for money).

It's not just CPUs at 1/40th of their brand new price: network gear too. And ECC RAM (before the recent RAM craze).

I'm pretty sure that if H200 begin to flood the used market, people shall quickly adapt.

> Unless Nvidia can launch a new chip every 2-3 years with massively improved performance-per-watt at a lower price no one is going to rush to recycle the old one.

I agree with that. But if they resell old H200s, people are resourceful and shall find a way to run these.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI&t=1577s

in the States.

A couple real world points:

1. They generally don't just fail. More likely a repairable component on a board fails and you can send it out to be repaired.

2. For my current stuff, I have a 3 year pro support contract that can be extended. Anything happens, Dell goes and fixes it. We also haven't had someone in our cage at the DC in over 6 months now.

An interesting perspective of IBM is its relative position. It's leveled off at about $60b/y, after a lengthy decline. It is far overmatched by many big tech companies today in terms of revenue.

It's a niche business, serving niche demands. I think IBM's moat is that most of its business is highly uninteresting: industrialized box ticking work, deeply entangled by contracts and a strong need for continuity by its customers.

I actually had a recent encounter with one of IBM's products. A commercial B2B REST API I created was analyzed by an IBM vulnerability scanning platform on behalf of a major US municipality. It didn't find anything actually critical, but there were some worthwhile points in the report, and working around a false positive was a frustration. The product, in this case, is diffusion of responsibility.

On the Big Iron end, IBM isn't really selling hardware. They selling an ecosystem: services, software, support, continuity (over decades,) etc. It pleases me that they chose to stick to Power: it's nice to know Itanium didn't kill off every enterprise RISC platform.

Maybe, one day, some major quantum computing breakthrough happens at IBM. As far as I can see, that's the only play they have that could change their trajectory. In the meantime, they have a large software portfolio and plenty of institutions that will keep signing contracts long after I'm gone.

They do a lot of stuff. Also own Hashicorp now, so they have things like: Ansible / RedHat Linux (already owned), Terraform, Consul, Nomad, Packer, etc. A lot of "let's build modern infra" tooling.

That stopped being true many years ago though, and the divergence has only accelerated with the advent of AI datacenter usage. The form factor is now fundamentally different (SXM instead of PCIe); you can adapt an SXM card to PCIe with some effort [1], but that may not even be worthwhile because 1. the power and cooling requirements for the SXM cards are radically different than a desktop part and more importantly 2. the dies are no longer even close to being the same. IIRC, Blackwell AI chips straight up don't have rasterization hardware onboard at all; internally they look like a moderate number of general SMs attached to a huge number of tensor core. Modern AI GPUs are fundamentally optimized for, well, mat-mults, which is not at all what you want for gaming or really any non-AI application.

[1] https://l4rz.net/running-nvidia-sxm-gpus-in-consumer-pcs/

So they have to hope they’re a part of the future in the AI capacity because their SaaS business is going to take a big hit.

YTD performance didn’t fully bake this reality in. It was seen as them having 2 huge revenue streams, the market is realizing that AI is a threat to SaaS and baking that into stonks

If you're OpenAI spending $100M on a training run they're not.

But if you're Oracle renting out GPUs to little guys doing inference, they are.