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You can't get excited about lower prices for your cloud GPU workloads thanks to the competition it brings to Nvidia? This benefits everyone, even if you don't
by crazygringo 2y ago
You can't get excited about lower prices for your cloud GPU workloads thanks to the competition it brings to Nvidia?
This benefits everyone, even if you don't use Google Cloud, because of the competition it introduces.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoI like owning things
- sodality2 2y agoCloud will buy less NVDA chips, and since they're related goods, prices will drop.
- throwaway48476 2y agoPricing is based on competitors more than demand.
- xadhominemx 2y agoYou own any GB200s?
- baobabKoodaa 2y agoYou will own nothing and you will be happy.
- simondotau 2y agoSeriously yes. I don’t want to own rapidly depreciating hardware if I don’t have to. I don’t want to own open source software and I’d prefer if culture was derived from and contributed to the public domain. I’m still fully on board with capitalism, but there are many instances where I’d prefer to replace physical acquisition with renting, or replacing corporate-made culture with public culture.
- throwaway48476 2y agoNvidia cloud instances have competition. What happens when you get vendor lock in with TPU and have no exit plan? Arguably it's competition that drives value creation, not capitalism.
- simondotau 2y agoJust don’t let yourself get stuck behind vendor lock-in, or if you do, never let yourself feel trapped, because you never are. Whenever assessing the work involved in building an integration, always assume you’ll be doing it twice. If that sounds like too much work then you shouldn’t have outsourced to begin with.
- throwaway48476 2y agoSwitching costs are a thing everywhere in the economy. Measure twice cut once. Planning on doing the work twice is asinine.
- simondotau 2y agoThen you shouldn’t have outsourced to begin with.
- karmasimida 2y agoOh, you own the generator for you GPU as well?
- Koshcheiushko 2y agoAnd time, energy to maintain that.
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- throwaway48476 2y ago[flagged]
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- maxrmk 2y agoI love to hate on google, but I suspect this is strategic enough that they wont kill it. Like graviton at AWS its as much of a negotiation tool as it is a technical solution, letting them push harder with NVIDIA on pricing because they have a backup option.
- mmx1 2y agoGoogle has done stuff primarily for negotiation purposes (e.g. POWER9 chips) but TPU ain't one. It's not a backup option or presumed "inferior solution" to NVIDIA. Their entire ecosystem is TPU-first.
- lostmsu 2y agoWas Gemini 2.5 trained on TPUs thought? I seem to be struggling to find that information. Wouldn't they want to mention it in every press release?
- mmx1 2y agoPretty sure the answer is yes. I have no direct knowledge of the matter for Gemini 2.5, but in general TPUs were widely used for training at Google. Even Apple used them to train their Apple Intelligence models. It’s not some esoteric thing to train on TPU; I would consider using GPU for that inside Google esoteric. P.S. I found an on-the-record statement re Gemini 1.0 on TPU: "We trained Gemini 1.0 at scale on our AI-optimized infrastructure using Google’s in-house designed Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) v4 and v5e. And we designed it to be our most reliable and scalable model to train, and our most efficient to serve."
- joshuamorton 2y ago