4 ms·
"seems like baking models into silicon is speed-running obsolescence" Now maybe. When models are flying passenger aircraft, other prerogatives will assert the
by topspin 2mo ago
"seems like baking models into silicon is speed-running obsolescence"
Now maybe. When models are flying passenger aircraft, other prerogatives will assert themselves. When a 50TB ROM means you can impulse purchase a ChatGPT 6.3 xhigh that runs on batteries, yet more use cases will be apparent.
- mdp2021 2mo agoWell, 50TB ROM Taalas HC1 style would be apparently a 400000b transistor system through a chip sized 2.5 meters on the side... :)
- thfuran 2mo agoPhones were getting too thin anyways.
- preg_match 2mo agoYes but have we considered employing, like, a really big block of ice? Like old-timey surgeries? What if we put a big block of ice on the 2.5 cubic meter CPU what happens then?
- topspin 2mo agoYes, I know. This view is how these problems are always perceived, decade after decade, as our predecessors filled rooms with iron and silicon, unable to fathom that the equivalent capacity and power would be a portable device 20 years later. We're not at some end point in this process: the devices we have now will appear just a primitive in the years to come as a 10MB 5.25" Winchester drive appears to us now. One of the underappreciated effects of the AI boom and associated money is that it has strongly reinvigorated R&D in hardware: it is clear that there is a real application for far greater density and lower power demand, and people are now pursuing this much harder than they had been. That will yield what it has always yielded; orders of magnitude jumps in capacity and performance.
- mdp2021 2mo ago> decade after decade That can only work when there is physical capacity for improvement though. > underappreciated effects of the AI boom and associated money is that it has strongly reinvigorated R&D in hardware Yes, absolutely: but the point at this stage is more about finding new possibilities in hardware architecture than the improvement of what we had. So > * That will yield what it has always yielded[:] orders of magnitude jumps in capacity and performance* That will yield new and renewed hardware technologies. (Already the distinction between SRAM and DRAM was overly specialistic before this boom - now it's on our mind as we know we need to "expand", "make cheap", "integrate" or find alternatives.)
- topspin 2mo ago> That can only work when there is physical capacity for improvement though. There are great opportunities for advancement. Both in the physical hardware and in how and where it's deployed and powered. Consider this, as only one point: there hasn't really been a demand for advancements in ROM. RAM has been scaling at approximately Moore's law rate, and nonvolatile R/W storage has been sedately scaling, but there hasn't been a use case for really dense, high performance ROM. Now there is. ROM used to be a big deal in computing and media (cartridges, optical disks, etc.,) but that tapered off long ago; volatile and R/W storage was sufficient and convenient for the time, and the inference model use case, where dense, high speed ROM can have extremely high value, didn't exist. Now there is a use case, and industry is thinking about something they haven't cared about in a long time. Current fabrication nodes, stacked in the third dimension à la NAND flash, could produce staggeringly dense, fast and low power ROM. That's why AMD snatched up Taalas: they're thinking about an aspect of the future that has been (reasonably) neglected.
- mdp2021 2mo agoSure, but actually, our current need is not really for "ROM": it is for "CiM", compute-in-memory - we want to minimize the data movement bottlenecks. That some implementations could be read-only is actually a disadvantage. Clearly there are possibilities, some of them proven (proof-of-concept, in-production etc.) - but taking for granted "Moore's law" like spaces for them may not be founded on what we know at this stage.
- heywoods 2mo agoOr autonomous weapon systems, missiles, and drones.
- umeshunni 2mo agoWhy would they need multi TB frontier models?
- adwn 2mo agoFor pondering trolley problems, maybe?
- topspin 2mo ago2026-08-13: "Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR) said it identified an Nvidia Jetson Orin computer module inside Russia’s new S-71M Monokhrom air-launched cruise missile" https://www.sofx.com/nvidia-ai-module-migrates-from-russian-drones-into-a-su-57-cruise-missile-ukraine-says/ https://www.sofx.com/nvidia-ai-module-migrates-from-russian-... Not "multi TB frontier" by any means, but the direction is clear: weapons will be made to think, for better or worse. Something of the scale of a frontier model will likely be seen in: loyal wingman aircraft, autonomous warships, military satellites, to name a few platforms.