10 ms·
How Jensen Huang's Nvidia is powering the A.I. revolution
- marifi 3y ago[flagged]
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoDid they use AI to make that Jensen Huang face out of chips and PCBs?
- VikingCoder 3y agoI remember when GLSL was being proposed and there was a lot of debate about how General Purpose it should be. Would people run non-graphical shaders on their GPUs? Yup.
- krackers 3y agoAren't compute shaders basically a poor man's cuda?
- lvl102 3y agoDid Nvidia power it or are they stifling it behind its monopoly. Tricky question to answer.
- dartos 3y agoThey’re powering it. they have the best hardware for it. Their vendor lock in is just CUDA, but that’s not really much lock in. You can train models on AMD cards too, but why would you when nvidia cards are just better for it atm.
- fancyfredbot 3y agoNvidia doesn't have a monopoly here. Google have their TPU, AMD have MI300, Intel have Data Centre GPU Max, and then there are start ups like Graphcore. There are many alternatives. I think people choose Nvidia because it's easier for them to use. That's because everyone else uses them, and that's because for years and years their competitors (other than Google perhaps) have dropped the ball on good software.
- hhsectech 3y agoNVIDIA is the leader because most academic AI setups are NVIDIA based. When AI moves further away from academia NVIDIA will have less of a grip. Proprietary, hardware specific APIs never stand the test of time. Ask 3Dfx. Either CUDA will open up, if it is to survive or open API use will spread. Weirdly, NVIDIA hardware only outperforms competitors on its own API. When you compare NVIDIA on a level playing field, they aren't the clear winners. Nobody is right now. I suspect the battle ground for AI will be accuracy rather than speed in the medium term and on paper AMD could win there...purely because they aren't shy about over speccing the RAM in their kit and certain price points. For me, I want to run the largest models I can with the least amount of quantization for the best bang for the buck...and AMD is right there as soon as people start picking up APIs outside of CUDA.
- Aromasin 3y agoI work for one of their big competitors, and all my conversations with customers tend to follow the same string; "NVIDIA is milking us dry, we want an alternative, but all the alternatives require significant redesign in languages and tools people are unfamiliar with and we can't afford that overhead". It tends to be very cut and dry. Until university labs get people working in open frameworks and not CUDA, every student joining the industry will default to NVIDIA GPUs until they're forced otherwise. The few people I've managed to convert have been forced by supply constraints, not any desire to innovate or save themselves money. As long as NVIDIA can keep the market satiated with a critical mass of compute, they'll sit on their throne for a long ol' while.
- joe_the_user 3y agoYeah - which is to say that that competitors and other competitors aren't actually going to create a CUDA replacement any time soon. And, correct me if I'm wrong, it would be quite possible to create such a thing - AMD had a system which had a tool to do conversion a while back but I recall them not supporting it seriously. The problem is that when a company has done serious capital investment to advance a market, anyone who invested equivalently wouldn't reap the same rewards - competition would just eat away each company's profits so no one will challenge that.
- cm2187 3y agoWould have been funny to see crypto competing with AI to splash ridiculous amounts of money on those chips.
- ravst3s 3y agoHow has Nvidia stifled anything? Nothing besides $ prevented their competitors from developing their own GPUs and software stack comparable to CUDA.
- dsign 3y agoI'm an Nvidia fanboy, but the lack of competition they have right now is concerning. Without competition, the prices of computing will stop going down, which means only big players would be able to play. It means that most of the economy will be cut off from most of the benefits of AI[^1]. [^1] That could be a good thing if our AIs are destined to replace us...it means it will take longer, because the AIs will have to pay very high taxes to NVIDIA[^2]. [^2] Or to the AIs in control of NVIDIA.
- larryliu 3y agoThere are competitions in the AI accelerator field. Google's TPU in addition to Intel Arc and AMD GPUs. The latter two have incomplete pytorch and JAX support.
- iancmceachern 3y agoYes but those aren't whole ecosystems of hardware and software like what Nvidia has
- gwern 3y ago> In May, hundreds of industry leaders endorsed a statement that equated the risk of runaway A.I. with that of nuclear war. Huang didn’t sign it. Some economists have observed that the Industrial Revolution led to a relative decline in the global population of horses, and have wondered if A.I. might do the same to humans. “Horses have limited career options,” Huang said. “For example, horses can’t type.” As he finished eating, I expressed my concerns that, someday soon, I would feed my notes from our conversation into an intelligence engine, then watch as it produced structured, superior prose. Huang didn’t dismiss this possibility, but he assured me that I had a few years before my John Henry moment. “It will come for the fiction writers first,” he said. Then he tipped the waitress a thousand dollars, and stood up to accept his award. If you ever wondered if you had what it took to be a NYer writer, consider if you could have provoked & recorded this vignette.
- matthewmcg 3y agoMy all time favorite from Ian Parker’s NYer profile of Johnny Ive: I asked Jeff Williams, the senior vice-president, if the Apple Watch seemed more purely Ive’s than previous company products. After a silence of twenty-five seconds, during which Apple made fifty thousand dollars in profit, he said, “Yes.”
- atleastoptimal 3y agoNot sure if you're implying that it's easy or hard to be a NYer writer
- Dr_Birdbrain 3y agoI’m going to say “hard”. That’s a beautiful piece of prose, both because of the social skills needed to elicit the behavior from Huang and because of the narrative skill to tell the story well.
- HDThoreaun 3y agoThe horse anecdote has always struck me as stupid as hell. Horses were replaced because they have no political power, they are tools. As long as we live in a democracy people will not become horses.
- ViktorRay 3y ago“Employee demographics are “diverse,” sort of—I would guess, based on a visual survey of the cafeteria at lunchtime, that about a third of the staff is South Asian, a third is East Asian, and a third is white.” This part of the article bothered me. Why was diverse placed in quotation marks? Aren’t South Asians and East Asians considered minorities? Also South Asians are a very diverse group in it itself. As are East Asians. Many different languages and cultures…. So why was diverse in quotation marks? Why did the author say “sort of”???
- fourier456 3y agoRhetorical question, what do you think?
- esafak 3y agoI think the writer is insinuating that ethnicity is only one type of diversity. What if 95% of those Asian employees were male, for instance?
- huytersd 3y ago[flagged]
- chaseha 3y agoAs well as the overwhelming majority-male workforce, which is mentioned right below this in the article.
- majormajor 3y agoThe full quote is: "Employee demographics are “diverse,” sort of—I would guess, based on a visual survey of the cafeteria at lunchtime, that about a third of the staff is South Asian, a third is East Asian, and a third is white. The workers are overwhelmingly male." That second sentence that the original poster here dropped gives you explicit clarification vs solely trying to infer what the quotation marks are doing.
- 0xcafefood 3y ago
- neonate 3y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20231129214109/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/04/how-jensen-huangs-nvidia-is-powering-the-ai-revolution https://web.archive.org/web/20231129214109/https://www.newyo... https://archive.ph/wtM7s https://archive.ph/wtM7s
- diamondfist25 3y agoShould have never sold NVDA stock when I bought them in 2007
- idonotknowwhy 3y agoAnd I should never have sold the AMD I bought just before ryzen 1. Hidesight though
- prashp 3y agoBetter to showsight
- b20000 3y agoWhy is this guy portayed as some kind of genius?
- tasty_freeze 3y ago"This guy" founded the company in 1993 and is still leading it, quite capably, 30 years later. It is often said that many startups need one type of CEO at founding but it takes a different skill set to be CEO of an established company. To lead it from 3 people to 25,000+, to have both technical chops, business chops, and PR chops is a rare combination. Back in the early 90s there were countless 3D chip startups, probably more than 35 (I was at two of them during those years) and they fell one by one until essentially only Nvidia and ATI remained. Ask the other 33 CEOs if they think Jensen was just lucky. Jensen believed that GPGPU could be a new market and spent heavily to push the idea and to make it real. Significant design work and silicon area was spent adding GPGPU features to chips before there was any software or any market for it. He invested in building compiler teams and writing libraries. He invested millions each year hosting a GPGPU conference and driving the vision. No, he didn't write those libraries or design the silicon, but it was his vision and willingness to invest in it that deserves respect. He isn't some schlub that simply got lucky one time. He has been manufacturing "luck" for 30 years.
- b20000 3y agoLots of people have vision and can do all of the above. I think what you meant is that he was good at convincing investors?
- tasty_freeze 3y agoState your opinion of what you think instead of pretending to put words in my mouth or know what is in my head.
- b20000 3y agoMy opinion is that it is common to confuse skill/genius with luck, timing, social network.
- BluSyn 3y agoNvidia should enjoy this period while it lasts. I fail to see any future where custom ASICs don't each their lunch. There's so much opportunity for custom silicon to massively improve compute-per-watt -- for both for training and inference. Nvidia got lucky with their high-memory GPUs being early to this space, but the usefulness of that architecture has already peaked.
- DoingIsLearning 3y agoI see plenty of custom ASIC startups but they all struggle to get decent funding. Which means they are all one tape-out away from insolvency. I don't really see NVIDIA's dominance changing (other than whatever AMD has in the pipeline) Unless VC's change their risk appetite and take interest in HW startup funding which seems unlikely considering the avg returns and success rate of HW startups.
- BluSyn 3y agoIn the short-term the ASICs won't come from startups. Think companies that already have custom silicon + deep pockets + a need to squeeze every watt at scale. Eg, Google (TPU), Apple (NPU), Amazon, Telsa (Dojo), Microsoft/OpenAI, etc.