thesmokingmanYou've clearly missed the point that these H100s cost $40K a piece and neural nets don't start working well till you get the gpu count over the thousands. Then there's the upkeep price which is insane. Any idea the cost to power and maintain a 10K gpu cluster buddy?

They want their own AI chip because they SEE that Elon's Dojo is providing the same performance as a 10K gpu cluster at 1/6th the cost and 1/4 the footprint.

People must think AI is free or something. There are huge costs for this level of compute and that's not even mentioning that the whole industry is compute constrained.

stimpy88What I find funny is the fact that every single serious player in the A.I. industry is talking about making their own chips

stimpy88What I find funny is the fact that every single serious player in the A.I. industry is talking about making their own chips, MS, Tesla, Google, OpenAI, Meta the list goes on. The collective hate for nGreedia and their business practices is palpable. Make hey while you can, you greedy little leather jacket man.

Price your products into the stratosphere nGreedia, and even the corps won't stick with you.

AusWolfA 150 g pack of potato chips costs way over £2 now in most shops now, which is outright ridiculous, so I guess I'd better make my own as well.

cvaldesNo, we do not. However the original post points out that there are possible cost efficiencies in rolling your own AI silicon rather than buying at the market.

The US government certainly isn't telling Nvidia how much to price their AI accelerators.

Right now it's basically this:

AI customer: "How much is this?"
Nvidia: "How much you got?"
AI customer: "I don't like your attitude."
Nvidia: "We have competitors. Ask them about pricing and availability."
AI customer: "But your stuff is better. And you have a better dev platform. And our staff is already familiar with your products."
Nvidia: "Don't worry, we'll sell what we have to someone."

It's important to note that Apple makes their own machine learning silicon (the Neural Engine in their marketing speak), but for their own use. They have already done what the original post basically describes since about 2017. And they probably started working on in earnest back in 2010.

There are no Nvidia Tensor cores in my iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Apple is not affected by the market's demand for Nvidia's AI products.

Silicon Valley was built by people who left larger companies to start their own thing, hoping to do better than the status quo. There's nothing new about OpenAI's thoughts. Google, Meta, Amazon, they all have teams working on custom silicon designs.

AssimilatorEvery time I see these "other companies are just going to invert their own cheap AI chips and then NVIDIA will die" posts I LOL at the inability to understand basic facts. Guess what, designing your own silicon is difficult and guess what, those companies are going to be headbutting the exact same wall of lack of foundry capacity that NVIDIA is.

What is actually happening is NVIDIA is telling these companies "we can't get capacity but if you're willing to buy some of Apple's allocation at TSMC for <stupid price>, we'll happily make those GPUs for you" and these companies are going "HOLY SHIT THAT'S EXPENSIVE" and NVIDIA is going "yeah, now you see our problem". Then these companies shit out press releases subtly threatening NVIDIA, who's sitting back going "why are we getting blamed when Apple is the one taking all the capacity"?

I'm more and more surprised every day that NVIDIA is still making consumer GPUs. Switch all your production to server GPUs, let the consumer market sit it out a few generations, it's not like we won't be waiting a couple of generations down the line. Especially given how AMD is barely competitive and Intel isn't in any way shape or form.


You mean the Dojo that also uses 10,000 NVIDIA GPUs?

ARFJust buy a kilo potatos for 1.17£, make your own "chips" and call it a day :D

A&amp;P211I love Nvidia, I bought their stock over 9months ago, has not disappoint.

AusWolfI wish I did too. As soon as others start manufacturing AI chips, the bubble will pop.

ymdhisokay, but then you have to factor in the cost of oil, salt, a deep fryer, and the cost of electricity and manual labor. It comes out significantly more expensive.

AusWolfA 150 g pack of potato chips costs way over £2 now in most shops now, which is outright ridiculous, so I guess I'd better make my own as well.

stimpy88But if they were $10 for a pack, you'd be an idiot not to.

AusWolfYou're already way better off making your own if you value your money more than your time. Even with a £2 pack price, you can make about 10x as much for yourself.

AssimilatorThe inverse of this is what so many fail to understand. Yes, Tesla built Dojo because they couldn't get enough NVIDIA GPUs fast enough... but it took them half a decade. That's a huge time and money sink into something that isn't your company's core competency.

The other problem is that, because nobody outside Tesla knows how Dojo works, anyone they recruit to work with it is going to need to be trained on its intricacies - which increases the cost of hiring and time for a new dev to ramp up. It also decreases the pool of talent willing to work for you, because Dojo isn't a transferable skill, so you are basically shackling yourself to Tesla if you choose to work there - and people experienced in the software development industry are simply too smart to do that. Which kinda sucks, since those are the people you most need.

Of course, maybe Tesla spent part of those 5 years perfecting a CUDA-to-Dojo transpiler and none of the above is relevant. But my experience with big companies is that they love building walled gardens - if not to trap users, then to trap developers. This is why open and shared standards are important.