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If I had to pick one player who wanted to win the AI race and was willing to be ruthless to do it, I'd pick Nvidia. Computation is the excludable bottleneck, a

If I had to pick one player who wanted to win the AI race and was willing to be ruthless to do it, I'd pick Nvidia. Computation is the excludable bottleneck, and Nvidia is the essentially the singular company who makes AI computers. Hire Ilya, get him to hire as many of the best folks he can. Stop selling GPUs. Hoard them. Introduce some subtle bug into the drivers that dramatically increases their rate of burn out. Figure out some reasonable way to give attribution to original content creators, approximately solve the content ID problem of the AI age. Cut the content creators into the rev share in proportion to their data importance to the model. Make the content creators incredibly pissed off that their work is being stolen by big AI companies unfairly and encourage to them to sue the other big AI firms. Their content share multiplier increases if they get injunctions against LLM firms. Convince politicians that the AI firms have performed an intellectual heist of epic proportions, and that they must not be allowed to even generate synthetic training data from poisoned models. With the content creators united behind you, convince congress that poisoned models must be destroyed, that even using synthetic training data from poisoned models must be illegal. Make them start over from a clean room with no copyrighted data.

johngossman 3y ago
> Stop selling GPUs. I'm not sure Wall St. would reward that plan
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  Yeah, he seems to have left out the critical middle step ("Gather investors to take $2T company private.")
- smegger001 3y ago
  don't stop just raise the margin slightly and limit the number available of the higher end chip using the proceeds to self fund building their own datacneter do runs of cards for themselves with higher core counts and clock speed that they dont release to others.
Ringz 3y ago
Sounds like someone has finally asked ChatGPT for a feasible plan to consolidate the AI landscape.
ben_w 3y ago
> Make them start over from a clean room with no copyrighted data. And when such models become popular[0], all the artists now have no job and no way to get compensation for being unable to work through no fault of their own. I don't think that's really a winning condition. It might make you feel better about the world, but the end result is still all the artists being out of work. [0] some models are already trained that way, although I assume you're using the word "copyrighted" in the conventional sense of "neither public domain nor an open license", as e.g. all my MIT licensed stuff is still copyrighted but it's fine to use.
- robrenaud 3y ago
  In my hypothetical future, at least the people who create the content used to train the models can get "training royalties", which they aren't getting now. There is still also money to be made in producing physical art or performances, even when AI can produce amazing digital works.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    "Make them start over from a clean room with no copyrighted data." makes "the people who create the content used to train the models" the empty set. > There is still also money to be made in producing physical art or performances, even when AI can produce amazing digital works. Perhaps, but it may be akin to the way there is still money to be made from horse drawn carriages in city centres, even when cars displaced them over a century ago — a rare treat for special occasions, to demonstrate wealth.
- rusticpenn 3y ago
  > It might make you feel better about the world, but the end result is still all the artists being out of work. Is it not the same with every leap in technology? There were professions like street lamp lighters, alarm services etc that have become redundant now?
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Sure, though I suspect "art" is the human version of a peacock tail — the difficulty is the point, it how we signal our worth to others, cheapening it breaks that signal — which would suggest that making all forms of art easy messes with (many of) us at a deep, essentially automatic, level. More specifically, I was responding to the idea that "compensating creators whose works are used to train the models" would actually solve anything; to use your examples, it would be as if the literal luddites were suggesting passing laws saying that "all textile machines that work like humans need to compensate the humans they displace, and also you need to make your new machines from scratch without talking to any textile workers to make sure you don't cheat", and my response would be analogous to saying "there's already machines which don't work like humans, so you're going to be out of work and have no compensation". The Luddite movement preceded The Communist Manifesto by about 30 years. Everything's sped up since then, so I'd be surprised if we have to wait 30 years for a political shift which is to AI what Communism was to industrialisation. I'm just hoping we don't get someone analogous to Stalin or Pol Pot this time.
bhouston 3y ago
>If I had to pick one player who wanted to win the AI race and was willing to be ruthless to do it, I'd pick Nvidia. Computation is the excludable bottleneck, and Nvidia is the essentially the singular company who makes AI computers. I've thought the same thing. NVIDIA getting into AI seriously is a vertical integration play and they often do that -- like NVIDIA trying to buy ARM.
codexon 3y ago
If google benchmarks are to be believed, gemini 1.5 will be better than gpt and they use their own chips (Google TPU), no nvidia involved. There is also Groq. I don't see Nvidia keeping their lead and profit margins forever.
- vGPU 3y ago
  Not to mention intel rapidly catching up in the $/perf calculation.
SunlitCat 3y ago
>Stop selling GPUs. Hoard them. Introduce some subtle bug into the drivers that dramatically increases their rate of burn out. Well, they didn't stop selling GPU when cryptomining was going strong. Instead they continued to sell them (with a hefty markup, tho). It's like selling shovels and picks during a gold rush.

johngossman 3y ago

> Stop selling GPUs. I'm not sure Wall St. would reward that plan

CamperBob2 3y ago
Yeah, he seems to have left out the critical middle step ("Gather investors to take $2T company private.")
smegger001 3y ago
don't stop just raise the margin slightly and limit the number available of the higher end chip using the proceeds to self fund building their own datacneter do runs of cards for themselves with higher core counts and clock speed that they dont release to others.

Ringz 3y ago

Sounds like someone has finally asked ChatGPT for a feasible plan to consolidate the AI landscape.

ben_w 3y ago

> Make them start over from a clean room with no copyrighted data. And when such models become popular[0], all the artists now have no job and no way to get compensation for being unable to work through no fault of their own. I don't think that's really a winning condition. It might make you feel better about the world, but the end result is still all the artists being out of work. [0] some models are already trained that way, although I assume you're using the word "copyrighted" in the conventional sense of "neither public domain nor an open license", as e.g. all my MIT licensed stuff is still copyrighted but it's fine to use.

robrenaud 3y ago
In my hypothetical future, at least the people who create the content used to train the models can get "training royalties", which they aren't getting now. There is still also money to be made in producing physical art or performances, even when AI can produce amazing digital works.
- ben_w 3y ago
  "Make them start over from a clean room with no copyrighted data." makes "the people who create the content used to train the models" the empty set. > There is still also money to be made in producing physical art or performances, even when AI can produce amazing digital works. Perhaps, but it may be akin to the way there is still money to be made from horse drawn carriages in city centres, even when cars displaced them over a century ago — a rare treat for special occasions, to demonstrate wealth.
rusticpenn 3y ago
> It might make you feel better about the world, but the end result is still all the artists being out of work. Is it not the same with every leap in technology? There were professions like street lamp lighters, alarm services etc that have become redundant now?
- ben_w 3y ago
  Sure, though I suspect "art" is the human version of a peacock tail — the difficulty is the point, it how we signal our worth to others, cheapening it breaks that signal — which would suggest that making all forms of art easy messes with (many of) us at a deep, essentially automatic, level. More specifically, I was responding to the idea that "compensating creators whose works are used to train the models" would actually solve anything; to use your examples, it would be as if the literal luddites were suggesting passing laws saying that "all textile machines that work like humans need to compensate the humans they displace, and also you need to make your new machines from scratch without talking to any textile workers to make sure you don't cheat", and my response would be analogous to saying "there's already machines which don't work like humans, so you're going to be out of work and have no compensation". The Luddite movement preceded The Communist Manifesto by about 30 years. Everything's sped up since then, so I'd be surprised if we have to wait 30 years for a political shift which is to AI what Communism was to industrialisation. I'm just hoping we don't get someone analogous to Stalin or Pol Pot this time.

bhouston 3y ago

>If I had to pick one player who wanted to win the AI race and was willing to be ruthless to do it, I'd pick Nvidia. Computation is the excludable bottleneck, and Nvidia is the essentially the singular company who makes AI computers. I've thought the same thing. NVIDIA getting into AI seriously is a vertical integration play and they often do that -- like NVIDIA trying to buy ARM.

codexon 3y ago

If google benchmarks are to be believed, gemini 1.5 will be better than gpt and they use their own chips (Google TPU), no nvidia involved. There is also Groq. I don't see Nvidia keeping their lead and profit margins forever.

vGPU 3y ago
Not to mention intel rapidly catching up in the $/perf calculation.

SunlitCat 3y ago

>Stop selling GPUs. Hoard them. Introduce some subtle bug into the drivers that dramatically increases their rate of burn out. Well, they didn't stop selling GPU when cryptomining was going strong. Instead they continued to sell them (with a hefty markup, tho). It's like selling shovels and picks during a gold rush.