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If you were to design a GPU several years ago, people would probably tell you designing it for AI is crazy and cryptocurrencies and raw hashing power is where t
by skocznymroczny 2y ago
If you were to design a GPU several years ago, people would probably tell you designing it for AI is crazy and cryptocurrencies and raw hashing power is where the money's at.
In the end, Nvidia kind of got lucky with their bet on AI. While CUDA has been a thing for a while, it was limited to mostly academic and workstation workloads. It wasn't until LLMs and things like Stable Diffusion when it really became popular.
Unfortunately for non-NV users, most of these AI workloads when run locally assume CUDA is present and it's a considerable effort to make them work on non-NV GPUs. It's fairly okay for common workloads like running basic LLMs and SD models, but as soon as you get into more advanced/obscure stuff the harder it gets without CUDA.
- rybosworld 2y ago> Nvidia kind of got lucky with their bet on AI I see flavors of this narrative quite often. Nvidia has been positioning their GPU's for AI since the late 2000's. And their GPU's were being used for AI at least as early as 2011 To me, it doesn't seem fair to discount Nvidia's foresight. A lot of smart people saw this opportunity even before the invention of LLM's. That's a bit like building a light bulb before discovering electricity.
- ghaff 2y agoI do think it's unfair to discount Nvidia's success as "having gotten lucky." On the other hand, I also think the back-to-back 1-2 punch of crypto and LLMs was probably hard to foresee as something way more important than a handful of high-end gamers and maybe some commercial linear algebra applications.