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Nvidia and Foxconn to build 'AI factories'
- lawlessone 3y agoHow future proof is all this stuff against changes in AI? What if someone discovers a viable alternative to ANN's or a way to implement them better that doesn't benefit from GPU's?
- kcb 3y agoThat's one of the benefits of GPGPUs vs custom training silicon. As long as the solution requires highly parallelizable calculations a GPU will be able to accelerate it.
- danielmarkbruce 3y agoChances that some algorithm won't involved a truck load of matmuls are close to zero.
- 29athrowaway 3y agoWe at least know the mammalian brain doesn't do it. Quick maths.
- danielmarkbruce 3y agoMaybe. It might just be matmuls all the way down.
- jjoonathan 3y agoOn the contrary, dendrites/synapses/axons implement something that looks an awful lot like matrix multiplication followed by an activation function. The biggest differences between bio and artificial neural networks -- spiking, backpropagation, etc -- seem to be in the non-matmul parts of the story.
- 29athrowaway 3y agoBut it is not matrix multiplication. We want it to be matrix multiplication, we want to use a minimalistic, elegant, reductionist approach, we want to claim we understand it, but in practice it's none of that otherwise we would have a working artificial brain. As we discover things we find those things at work in the brain, but the brain is too advanced for us to make proper sense of it.
- jjoonathan 3y agoWe only understand a small part of a big story, but we do understand that small part and it does look like matrix multiplication. Most of what goes on in the brain is up for debate. But not that part. Incidentally, this is the whole reason why reductionist approaches are so important: without reductionism, you can never get a foothold. You are adrift in a sea of woo and can never make any progress towards understanding because one nonfalsifiable holistic theory is as good as the next. However, if you break the system down into pieces until you do understand a piece, you can start to put the puzzle together. Dendrites, synapses, action potentials, thresholds, potentiation, plasticity -- these things are real, we do understand them under an ever growing set of circumstances, and while the picture on the puzzle is still anyone's guess the corner that looks like matrix multiplication is fully assembled and not going anywhere.
- 29athrowaway 3y agoIt is a straw man.
- dkislyuk 3y agoIn the current world, deep learning with homogeneous computation graphs, tuned with backprop, has won the Hardware Lottery [1]. This is unfortunate for research outside of that area, but just looking at the momentum of development it seems like a sure bet to keep investing in GPU-based training and inference for the next decade. There's just too much lock-in already to this paradigm. If a new algorithm appears from with a novel approach (analog compute, heterogeneous computation graphs from genetic algorithms, quantum, much more...), there will be a whole generation of R&D + tool + framework building, which gives the major players enough time to adapt. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.06489 https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.06489
- amelius 3y agoYes, let's exploit millions of poor workers, so they can make themselves obsolete.
- okokwhatever 3y agoMate, the question is "who will do it first?"
- silveraxe93 3y agohttps://laneless.substack.com/p/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics https://laneless.substack.com/p/the-copenhagen-interpretatio...
- svnt 3y agoSo many fallacies here it is hard to know where to start.
- bannedbybros 3y ago[dead]
- scotty79 3y agoWhy not? It's the main quest of humanity. Make yourself obsolete
- magicink81 3y agoIs humanity monolithic? Are other quests available?
- scotty79 3y agoPretty much, and no, not really.
- jprete 3y agoWho decided that, again? Or is this an unconsciously disguised statement of techno-religion?
- 01100011 3y agoSeems like Foxconn is trying to get ready for losing Apple to India.
- dannyw 3y agoNVIDIA is great at investor marketing.
- gustavus 3y ago> Mr Liu also said Foxconn is trying to "convert itself from a manufacturing service company to a platform solution company," citing smart cities and smart manufacturing as other applications for AI factories. Its seems like China is trying to speed run modern capitalism they are now moving from the manufacturing stage to the "spew constant BS in order to deceive investors stage".
- Vt71fcAqt7 3y agoFoxconn is Taiwanese.
- sunnybythesea 3y agoYes and for now Taiwan is not China...
- justinclift 3y agoAs I understand it, that island (Taiwan) hasn't ever been part of (CCP) China?
- lesuorac 3y agoTaiwan is basically as-if the Confederacy fled from the Union and took over Cuba. And then both the Confederacy and Union laid claim to the United States except obviously the Union actually has physical control over it. Also imagine that the rest of the world was pro-slavery so they liked the Confederacy more so initially all the countries only recognize Taiwan as the actual "United States" but its obviously more practical to recognize the Union (China) as the actual "United States" as you start doing a ton of business. Basically replace Union with CCCP, Cuba with Taiwan, and pro-slavery with Democracy (CCCP being Communists).
- Vt71fcAqt7 3y agoMore like if the union lost and fled to Cuba. But there is really no point in trying to making this comparison. They are only similar in that both are civil wars. Beyond that they are different in almost every aspect: from the initial conditions to the war itself to its end.
- gene-h 3y agoI think the TL;DR is foxconn wants to assemble data center/a bunch of servers with Nvidia's chips which they call AI factories, but the marketing BS is strong.
- msarrel 3y agoI can't wait to send all my sensitive corporate data to China for AI.
- dangus 3y agoDamn, I guess my plans to make my Web 3.0 Blockchain NFT Big Data Hybrid Cloud factory are out of date.
- automatic6131 3y agoGraduated too late to explore the blockchain. Graduated too early to experience fully automated luxury space communism. Graduated just in time to work in an AI factory