this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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[–] [email protected] 237 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Thank fucking god.

I got sick of the overhyped tech bros pumping AI into everything with no understanding of it....

But then I got way more sick of everyone else thinking they're clowning on AI when in reality they're just demonstrating an equal sized misunderstanding of the technology in a snarky pessimistic format.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 3 months ago (4 children)

I’m more annoyed that Nvidia is looked at like some sort of brilliant strategist. It’s a GPU company that was lucky enough to be around when two new massive industries found an alternative use for graphics hardware.

They happened to be making pick axes in California right before some prospectors found gold.

And they don’t even really make pick axes, TSMC does. They just design them.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago (1 children)

They just design them.

It's not trivial though. They also managed to lock dev with CUDA.

That being said I don't think they were "just" lucky, I think they built their luck through practices the DoJ is currently investigating for potential abuse of monopoly.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Yeah CUDA, made a lot of this possible.

Once crypto mining was too hard nvidia needed a market beyond image modeling and college machine learning experiments.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago (2 children)

They didn't just "happen to be around". They created the entire ecosystem around machine learning while AMD just twiddled their thumbs. There is a reason why no one is buying AMD cards to run AI workloads.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago

One of the reasons being Nvidia forcing unethical vendor lock in through their licensing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

I feel like for a long time, CUDA was a laser looking for a problem.
It's just that the current (AI) problem might solve expensive employment issues.
It's just that C-Suite/managers are pointing that laser at the creatives instead of the jobs whose task it is to accumulate easily digestible facts and produce a set of instructions. You know, like C-Suites and middle/upper managers do.
And NVidia have pushed CUDA so hard.

AMD have ROCM, an open source cuda equivalent for amd.
But it's kinda like Linux Vs windows. NVidia CUDA is just so damn prevalent.
I guess it was first. Cuda has wider compatibility with Nvidia cards than rocm with AMD cards.
The only way AMD can win is to show a performance boost for a power reduction and cheaper hardware. So many people are entrenched in NVidia, the cost to switching to rocm/amd is a huge gamble

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Imo we should give credit where credit is due and I agree, not a genius, still my pick is a 4080 for a new gaming computer.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 3 months ago (1 children)

As I job-hunt, every job listed over the past year has been "AI-drive [something]" and I'm really hoping that trend subsides.

[–] [email protected] 65 points 3 months ago (3 children)

"This is an mid level position requiring at least 7 years experience developing LLMs." -Every software engineer job out there.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 3 months ago

That was cloud 7 years ago and blockchain 4

[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago

Reminds me of when I read about a programmer getting turned down for a job because they didn't have 5 years of experience with a language that they themselves had created 1 to 2 years prior.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I'm a data engineer and I get that there's a lot of potential in analytics with AI, but you don't need to hire a data engineer with LLM experience for aggregating payroll data.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

there’s a lot of potential in analytics with AI

I'd argue there is a lot of potential in any domain with basic numeracy. In pretty much any business or institution somebody with a spreadsheet might help a lot. That doesn't necessarily require any Big Data or AI though.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

The tech bros had to find an excuse to use all the GPUs they got for crypto after they bled that dry

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

If that’s the reason, I wouldn’t even be mad, that’s recycling right there.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

The tech bros had to find an excuse to use all the GPUs they got for crypto after they ~~bled that dry~~ upgraded to proof-of-stake.

I don't see a similar upgrade for "AI".

And I'm not a fan of BTC but $50,000+ doesn't seem very dry to me.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

No, it's when people realized it's a scam