In Ep #7 ⚡The Chip Paradox 🤯

^{Read time: 7 mins}

No monkeying about… chips are what power AI. but they are also the constraint. Let’s not go too bananas, but who owns most chips wins. Or is it? NVIDIA will soon be a $2 trillion company, but what about us mere humans? How on earth can knowing where the money goes on chips tells us where the power lies, or where GenAI is going?

News - Non-chip companies are now making AI chips

Meta, Microsoft, AWS, are joining Apple and NVIDIA with their own chip designs for AI

How-to’s - How to access AI chips

Buy on Ebay and deploy on-premises, or rent via the cloud? We have an example.

News - non-chip companies are now making AI chips.

^{Meta, Microsoft, AWS, they are all using their own chip designs for AI.}

NVIDIA is the leader in the AI hardware market: its valuation is heading for $2 trillion market cap in 2024, all on the back of it’s GPU business.

Who’s buying all these NVIDIA chips? Well, if you watched last year’s mega IT conferences you’d find NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Huang, front-and-centre on stage at them all!

But NVIDIA isn’t just a chip chopper: they also run datacenters, and just recently they announced their own GenAI software stack Chat with RTX that let’s you run your own, private, GenAI chat on a computer at home if it has their RTX GPU.

So is it any wonder that the consumer software companies like Apple, Meta, Amazon are all rushing to lessen their dependency on nVidia and get their own chips in their own offerings?

Apple unveils M3 - most advanced chips for a personal computer.

The industry’s first 3-nanometer chips for a personal computer debut a next-generation GPU architecture and deliver dramatic performance improvements, a faster CPU and Neural Engine, and support for more unified memory. Read more….

Meta to deploy in-house custom chips this year to power AI drive.

The chip, a second generation of an in-house silicon line Meta announced last year, could help to reduce Meta's dependence on the NVIDIA (NVDA.O), opens new tab chips that dominate the market and control the spiraling costs associated with running AI workloads as it races to launch AI products. Read more…

BREAKING NEWS: Meta says (chip maker) Broadcom CEO, Hock Tan, is joining board of directors. Meta’s board additions underscore the company’s efforts to expand its data center and computing infrastructure as part of its massive investments into AI and the metaverse. Read more…

How-to’s - An example of accessing your own GenAI chips

^{Ebay and on-premises, or via the cloud?}

Rent them in the Cloud

• Google Tensor TPUs have been available since 2016, the latest being the TPU v5e “Google has stitched together the TPU v5e chips into batches of 256 that it describes as a supercomputer.

• AWS Inferentia, also Graviton, Trainium.

  High performance at the lowest cost in Amazon EC2 for deep learning inference

• Microsoft’s Maia 100 and Cobalt 100, are fed by 200 gigabit-per-second networking, said Microsoft, and can deliver 12.5 gigabytes per second of data throughput.

IN NEXT WEEK’S EP. #8 OF YOU AND AI NEWS

Next week’s theme will be APPLIED GENAI, as in, using it practically in business. We are researching the use of GenAI by business services like accountants, human resources, and much more. We’ve identified 20 business processes, each of which has 10-ish “jobs to be done” — does this mean GenAI might apply to 200+ business jobs? We’re here to find out!

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