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> Nvidia owns the AI development game because they own the datacenter. Eh I only half agree with this. Nvidia owns AI development because they own the datacent

> Nvidia owns the AI development game because they own the datacenter. Eh I only half agree with this. Nvidia owns AI development because they own the datacenter and a large fraction of PCs. Kids playing games grow up learning CUDA on their PCs, then can professionally test stuff on them without having to rent a costly cloud instance just for debugging and experimentation. Hence many datacenter-only AI companies have failed. Others with extremely competitive silicon (like Cerebras) are alive but spinning their wheels without much traction. Llama, and stable diffusion in particular, are pretty slow on CPU. It works, but I would say its not very usable. And this is a problem that will get worse, not better. If Apple sicked more engineers on making random contributions to community efforts (instead of doing everything in secret because they are Apple) IMO they could have a very strong consumer inference/finetuning presence without any datacenter presence. Nvidia/AMD do this to some extent, though not as much as they should either.

smoldesu 3y ago
They could certainly position themselves well for inferencing and finetuning, but that's not what the article is about. This falls under the genre of "Apple can upend AI development" articles, which is a much different (and far-fetched) proposition. Apple does not manufacture competitive hardwdare for this space, and their track record on the software side is mottled with potholes. I'm not convinced Apple could carve out a market for themselves even if they wanted. No developer who values stability should willingly get in bed with the company that axed 32-bit execution modes and Nvidia drivers like it was clipping their nails. Specifically, these are the articles that feel outlandish. Anyone can position themselves well for inferencing (most of all when you design your own CPU), but Apple couldn't "just do" what Nvidia does. Their philosophies are worlds apart, despite both being fairly lock-and-key with their approach.

smoldesu 3y ago

They could certainly position themselves well for inferencing and finetuning, but that's not what the article is about. This falls under the genre of "Apple can upend AI development" articles, which is a much different (and far-fetched) proposition. Apple does not manufacture competitive hardwdare for this space, and their track record on the software side is mottled with potholes. I'm not convinced Apple could carve out a market for themselves even if they wanted. No developer who values stability should willingly get in bed with the company that axed 32-bit execution modes and Nvidia drivers like it was clipping their nails. Specifically, these are the articles that feel outlandish. Anyone can position themselves well for inferencing (most of all when you design your own CPU), but Apple couldn't "just do" what Nvidia does. Their philosophies are worlds apart, despite both being fairly lock-and-key with their approach.