Locator: 51902AI.
I mentioned this the other day: one of my pet peeves is having to listen all day to CNBC talking heads having little understanding of the sixth industrial revolution (AI) as Jensen Huang, Sam Altman others see it.
Almost every CNBC talking head seems to think the AI tsunami can't last much longer, that it's nothing more than a bubble, similar / identical to the 2000 dot.com debacle.
Two articles caught my attention yesterday.
First article, link here: from Shay Boloor -- AMD CEO Lisa Su is heading for South Korea to secure HBM4 supply from SKHY and Samsung as MI450 ramps with 432GB of memory per GPU.
Second article, link here:
Google really wanted pioneering AI researcher Noam Shazeer back.
The longtime employee left to start his own company but in 2024, Google paid $2.7 billion for him to return to work on cutting-edge projects, including its most powerful AI technology, Gemini.
Even that, though, couldn’t ensure that Shazeer got the computing resources he wanted.
Less than two years later, he sent a note to one of his teams saying that Google had cut what was allocated to them in favor of another project. Shortly thereafter, Shazeer left for rival OpenAI.
Compute, the industry shorthand for computing power, is the lifeblood of the AI boom, and it’s in short supply. Now fights over how to get more of it—and what projects to give priority to—are sending a powerful industry scrambling. Bitter rivals are forming new alliances, such as Elon Musk and Dario Amodei, whose companies worked together to secure computing power. Venture-capital firms are touting access to AI chips to woo startups. And power struggles are more frequent as companies compete in a worldwide treasure hunt for the tech industry’s most coveted resource.
“There’s a big gold rush happening at the moment,” said Evan Conrad, chief executive officer of San Francisco Compute. “It’s hard to fully comprehend the scale.”
Conrad’s company vets data centers and then rents their computing power to AI companies that range from the largest players like Nvidia to small startups like Standard Intelligence. Its chief technology officer, Eric Park, travels the globe in search of computing resources hiding where few else think to look.
In the spring, it was far-flung corners of rural America, where one promising new data center turned out to be AI servers humming inside what appeared to be a converted chicken coop. Then Manila in monsoon season, where Park’s car stalled in floodwater and he and his colleagues waded to safety, bags held over their heads. Eventually, a passing truck shuttled him to the airport, where he bought a new pair of shoes and boarded a flight to Taipei—to meet with a company building servers for the AI boom.
For the record: I love Gemini -- I use Gemini almost exclusively among the many chatbots which I have tried. Free version.
Back to the blog: Google doesn't pay $2.7 billion to entice one worker back to the company if this were a six-week project. Do the math, but if the $2.7 billion is one million dollars / year this equates to 2,700 years -- and that doesn't include cost of deploying that $2.7 billion -- and that's for one employee.
I honestly cannot get my mind around the dollars being spent in this sector.
Maybe The WSJ made a typographical error.
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The Book Page
It's hard to wait for the arrival of this book which will arrive today from Amazon. Gemini recommended it based on my reading history and our discussions.
Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz | Feb 15, 2022. 384 pages.
