arcanus
Joined 13 years ago
Joined 13 years ago
It doesn't go to zero, however!
It is pretty clear that Nvidia is sunsetting FP64 support, and they are selling a story that no serious computational scientist I know believes, namely that you can use low precision operations to emulate higher precision.
See for example, https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/18/nvidia_fp64_emulation...
It seems the emulation approach is slower, has more errors, and doesn't apply to FP64 vector, only matrix operations.
Did you profile at all? And have you observed if it's not compute-bound? If it's memory or IO bound it can be due to other virtualization overheads, such as memory encryption.
The two largest supercomputers in the world are powered by AMD. I don't think it's accurate to say Nvidia has monopoly on HPC
The essay attempted to mitigate this by noting OAI is nominally a non-profit. But it's clear the actions of the leadership are firmly aligned with traditional capitalism. That's perhaps the only interesting subtly of the issue, but the essay missed this entirely. The omission could not have been intentional, because it provides a complete motivation for item #2.
[1] #2 is 'The US is a democracy and China isn’t, so anything that helps the US “win” the AI “race” is good for democracy.'
This is the crux of the issue. There's simply no clearly articulated doom scenarios that don't involve massive leaps in capabilities that are explained away by the 'singularity' being essentially magic. The entire approach is a doomed version of deus ex machina.
It also appears quite telling the traditional approach is focused on exotic technologies, such as nanotech, and not ICBMs. That's also magical thinking.
It's that start up funding that will drive talent, more than anything else.
For example, high bandwidth, low latency interconnects, supporting GPU direct network messaging and IO, are important.
High memory bandwidth is also quite important.
Debugging and performance profiling at scale also commonly uses similar tools.
Juicy. Anyone have a link or context to this? I'd not heard of this reception to NOVA and related.