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Opinions are my own. I think the biggest winner of this might be Google. Virtually all the frontier AI labs use TPU. The only one that doesn't use TPU is OpenA
by thanhhaimai 5mo ago
Opinions are my own.
I think the biggest winner of this might be Google. Virtually all the frontier AI labs use TPU. The only one that doesn't use TPU is OpenAI due to the exclusive deal with Microsoft. Given the newly launched Gen 8 TPU this month, it's likely OpenAI will contemplate using TPU too.
- maxclark 5mo agoAnd almost by happenstance Apple. Turns out they have a great platform for inference and torched almost nothing comparatively on Siri. The Apple/Gemini deal is interesting, Google continues to demonstrate their willingness to degrade their experience on Apple to try and force people to switch.
- bigyabai 5mo agoApple is basically in the same boat as AMD and Intel. They have a weak, raster-focused GPU architecture that doesn't scale to 100B+ inference workloads and especially struggles with large context prefill. TPUs smoke them on inference, and Nvidia hardware is far-and-away more efficient for training.
- brcmthrowaway 5mo agoThis doesn't get talked about enough - the GPU is weak, weak, weak. And anyone who can fix them will go to a serious AI company (for 2-3x the salary).
- jorvi 5mo agoThe GPU is monstrously good. Depending on the workload, the M1 series GPU using 120W could beat an RTX 3090 using 420W. Same with the CPU. Linux compiled faster on an M1 than on the fastest Intel i9 at the time, again using only 25% of the power budget. And the M-series has only gotten better. It is kind of sad Apple neglects helping developers optimize games for the M-series because iDevices and MacBooks could be the mobile gaming devices.
- ethbr1 5mo agoApples and limes. The context of this thread isn't consumer chips, but Apple's analog to an H/B200.
- bigyabai 5mo agoThe GPUs are bottom-barrel for compute-focused industries. It is mobile-grade hardware that arguably can't even scale to prior Mac Pro workloads. > The GPU is monstrously good. Depending on the workload, the M1 series GPU using 120W could beat an RTX 3090 using 420W. You're just listing the TDP max of both chips. If you limit a 3090 to 120W then it would still run laps around an M1 Max in several workloads despite being an 8nm GPU versus a 5nm one. > It is kind of sad Apple neglects helping developers optimize games for the M-series Apple directly advocated for ports like Death Stranding, Cyberpunk 2077 and Resident Evil internally. Advocacy and optimization are not the issue, Apple's obsession over reinventing the wheel with Metal is what puts the Steam Deck ahead. Edit (response to matthewmacleod): > Bold of them to reinvent something that hadn't been invented yet. Vulkan was not the first open graphics API, as most Mac developers will happily inform you.
- 5mo ago
- hellohello2 5mo agoWhat do TPUs do to improve on GPUs at inference?
- saagarjha 5mo agoMore compute
- munk-a 5mo agoApple is in a much better boat than AMD or Intel. They have a gigantic warchest and can just snap up whoever looks like a leader coming out of the bubble burst.
- Gigachad 5mo agoIt's becoming increasingly clear that there is no moat on models. The winners will be the ones who have existing products and ecosystems they can tie AI in to. You will pay adobe for credits because that will be the only AI that works in Photoshop, you will pay microsoft because only theirs will work on your microsoft cloud apps. Open AI has nothing. Their tech will rapidly be devalued by free models the moment they stop lighting stacks of cash on fire.
- kavalg 5mo agoI kind of agree with you at this point. When ChatGPT was rapidly gaining popularity I thought that they will eventually replace search (esp. for shopping), which would have given them a huge ad revenue. Maybe they could have even tried social networking e.g., to help you sort out the huge flow of information that today's social networks are and get to the important/rewarding/whatever posts. But now ChatGPT is kind of getting commoditized. I would even dare say that gemini feels to me a bit better now, so the search route for ChatGPT is clearly gone.
- ipaddr 5mo agoOpenAI is handling 15% of US traffic.
- cheema33 5mo ago> OpenAI is handling 15% of US traffic. The parent post was arguing that they can do this now because they are lighting stacks of cash on fire. And once they stop doing that, their LLM lead will be gone in a hurry. They appear to not have a moat, like other more established players do.
- 5mo ago
- GorbachevyChase 5mo agoThey also degrade their own direct services with little warning or thought put into change management, so, to be fair, Apple may be getting the same quality of service as the rest of us.
- vharish 5mo agoI think that's just how Google is, by nature. They don't intentionally degrade their services. They just aren't a customer centric company. They run on numbers. As a corporate, it doesn't really encourage support and maintenance work either.
- ttul 5mo agoIf you do the math (I did), in 2 years, open source models that you can run on a future MacBook Pro will be as capable as the frontier cloud models are today. Memory bandwidth is growing rapidly, as is the die area dedicated to the neural cores. And all the while, we have the silicon getting more power efficient and increasingly dense (as it always does). These hardware improvements are coming along as the open source models improve through research advancements. And while the cloud models will always be better (because they can make use of as much power as they want to - up in the cloud), what matters to most of us is whether a model can do a meaningful share of knowledge work for us. At the same time, energy consumption to run cloud infrastructure is out-pacing the creation of new energy supply, which is a problem not easily solved. I believe scarcity of energy will increasingly drive frontier labs toward power efficiency, which necessarily implies that the Pareto frontier of performance between cloud and local execution will narrow.
- rc1 5mo agoShow your working / explain your math?
- parineum 5mo agohttps://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
- npunt 5mo agoI did this calculation a bit ago and don't think frontier models are just a few MacBook Pro generations away. Yes numbers reliably go up in tech in general but in specific semiconductors & standards have long lead-times and published roadmaps, so we can have high confidence in what we're getting even in 3-4 years in terms of both transistor density and RAM speeds. In mid-2028 we have N2E/N2P with around 15% greater transistor density than today's N3P, and by EOY2028 we'll likely have A14 with about 35-40% density improvement. Meanwhile, we'll be on LPDDR6 by that point, which takes M-series Pros from 307GB/s -> ~400GB/s, and Max's from 614GB/s -> ~800GB/s. Model improvements obviously will help out, but on the raw hardware front these aren't in the ballpark for frontier model numbers. An H100 has 3TB/s memory bandwidth, fwiw
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- manueltgomes 5mo agoIndeed. I'm wondering if Apple's "miss the train" with AI ended up being a blessing for them. Not only in the Google deal but also there's a lot of people doing interesting stuff locally..
- VirusNewbie 5mo agoOpenAI uses GCP. I don't know if they use TPUs. https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/openai-taps-google-unprecedented-cloud-deal-despite-ai-rivalry-sources-say-2025-06-10/ https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/openai-taps...
- bastawhiz 5mo agoMany labs use TPUs, but not exclusively. Most labs need more compute than they can get, and if there's TPU capacity, they'll adapt their systems to be able to run partially on TPUs.
- gpt5 5mo agoWhy is AMD not more popular then if labs are so flexibly with giving away CUDA?
- mattnewton 5mo agopeople are trying, especially for inference. For training, it’s just too high risk to tank your training I think. TPUs are at least dogfooded by Google deepmind, no team AFAIK has gotten the AMD stack to train well.
- coder-3 5mo agoInteresting. Why? My current mental model is that AMD chips are just a bit behind, so, less efficient, but no biggie. Do labs even use CUDA?
- PKop 5mo ago[flagged]
- operatingthetan 5mo agoAt this point that phase is an attempt at status signaling.
- sghiassy 5mo agoOpinions are my own But I think you’re right
- muyuu 5mo agoit's hilarious though it's like people are LARPing a Fortune company CEO when they're giving their hot takes on social media reminds me of Trump ending his wild takes on social media with "thank you for your attention to this matter" - so out of place, it makes it really funny *typo
- PretzelPirate 5mo ago> it's like people are LARPing a Fortune company CEO when they're giving their hot takes on social media At least in large tech companies, they have mandatory social media training where they explicitly tell employees to use phrases like "my views are my own" to keep it clear whether they're speaking on behalf of their employer or not.
- operatingthetan 5mo agoIf their name is on the post or their company is listed in their profile. The person above has neither as far as I can tell.
- muyuu 5mo agoi've worked in two different large tech companies when i give my hot takes pseudonymously on social media these phrases would be nothing but a LARP i don't put my real name here nor do i put my professional commitments in my profile, and neither does this guy
- philippta 5mo agoIn the recent Dwarkesh Podcast episode Jensen Huang (Nvidia) said that virtually nobody but Anthropic uses TPUs. How does that add up?
- sarchertech 5mo agoWho is the other frontier lab other than Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google? I thought they were ahead of everyone else.
- DeathArrow 5mo agoFolks who make Deepseek, Qwen, GLM, MiniMax, Kimi and MiMo.
- SwellJoe 5mo agoThey're at the frontier of last year. They compete with Opus 4.5. They don't yet compete with current frontier models. They'll presumably catch up, there is no monopoly on talent held by the US. And, that's more true than ever now that the US is actively hostile to immigrants. Scientists who might have come to the US three years ago have little reason to do so now.
- sfink 5mo agoNit: scientists have the same reasons to do so now, the same as ever. They just have additional reasons to not do so. But even that distinction is only temporary, since we're determined to piss away any remaining research lead that draws people in. Hopefully the next administration will work at actively reversing the damage, with incentives beyond just "we pinky-promise not to haul you at gunpoint to a concrete detention center and then deport you to Yemen".
- sofixa 5mo ago> Hopefully the next administration will work at actively reversing the damage, with incentives beyond just "we pinky-promise not to haul you at gunpoint to a concrete detention center and then deport you to Yemen". Won't be enough to undo the damage. The US would have to do a full about face, prosecute crimes of the current administration and enact serious core reforms to make it impossible for things to drastically change again in 4 years. Also known as, never going to happen because even the current opposition party doesn't actually want structural change. The world has seen how bad the US can get from a single election, and that isn't changing any time soon.
- bastardoperator 5mo agoYou think the company that just gave 40B to Anthropic is the winner? Interesting.
- u_fucking_dork 5mo agoYou think the company that just gave 40B to Anthropic isn’t the winner? Interesting.
- bastardoperator 5mo agoWas Microsoft the winner based on their 50B investment in OpenAI?
- girvo 5mo agoIf OpenAI had won the enterprise race, then maybe?
- MattRix 5mo agoThat deal is a win-win for Google. If they develop a better coding model than Anthropic and beat them at coding, then they win. If they don’t, they still win by making a ton of money from Anthropic long term.
- munk-a 5mo agoWell, it's a lose for Google if all the money disappears into thin air - but I agree that it's mostly upsides for them because of how (relatively) small the investment is for this much upside.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- rishabhaiover 5mo agoThe only reason anyone uses a TPU is because they couldn't get the best GPUs.
- imtringued 5mo agoOkay? I'm not sure where you're going with this. Google's TPUs have obvious advantages for inference and are competitive for training.
- ignoramous 5mo ago> The only one that doesn't use TPU is OpenAI For inference? This is from July 2025: OpenAI tests Google TPUs amid rising inference cost concerns, https://www.networkworld.com/article/4015386/openai-tests-google-tpus-amid-rising-inference-cost-concerns.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/4015386/openai-tests-go... / https://archive.vn/zhKc4 https://archive.vn/zhKc4 > ... due to the exclusive deal with Microsoft This exclusivity went away in Oct 2025 (except for 'API' workloads). OpenAI has contracted to purchase an incremental $250B of Azure services, and Microsoft will no longer have a right of first refusal to be OpenAI’s compute provider. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/10/28/the-next-chapter-of-the-microsoft-openai-partnership https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/10/28/the-next-chapter... / https://archive.vn/1eF0V https://archive.vn/1eF0V
- sdevonoes 5mo ago[flagged]
- terobyte 5mo agoI heard a lot of rumors that google is cooking. And it is what will win the ai game
- alphabeta3r56 5mo ago> Microsoft will no longer pay a revenue share to OpenAI. > Revenue share payments from OpenAI to Microsoft continue through 2030, independent of OpenAI’s technology progress, at the same percentage but subject to a total cap. How is this helping OpenAI?
- freakynit 5mo agoHad written a blog post on the same a few days back, if anyone's interested in readng (hardly 5 minute read): Can Google Win the AI Hardware Race Through TPUs? https://google-ai-race.pagey.site/ https://google-ai-race.pagey.site/
- OlivOnTech 5mo agoHello, your link says "~20 min read" wich seems to be the case!
- kushalpandya 5mo agoI wish Google would launch Mac Mini-like devices running their consumer-grade TPUs for local inference. I get that they don't want it to eat into their GCP margins, but it would still get them into consumer desktops that Pixel Books could never penetrate (Chromebooks don't count and may likely become obsolete soon due to MacBook Neo).
- agentbc9000 5mo agoDont forget Elon, i am sure this news will come up on the up and coming OpenAI vs Elon Musk trail starting soon! I cant wait to hear all the discovery from this trail
- celeritascelery 5mo agoMaybe I am missing something here, but if all the frontier AI labs use TPU, why is Nvidia making so much money?
- replygirl 5mo agotraining, multicloud, onprem, resale
- unixhero 5mo agoWhy is it called frontier and why is it called a frontier ai lab?
- fnord123 5mo agoBecause they are based on [the west coast of the US](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_frontier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_frontier). DeepSeek, Z.ai, Moonhsot, and Mistral are never called frontier because they aren't based in California.
- timssopomo 5mo agoOutside of California they're sparkling ai labs.
- dwaltrip 5mo agoHuh, interesting. History casts a long shadow.
- dwaltrip 5mo agoIt’s like “cutting edge”. A metaphor for the newest and best.