Homeless Data Shelters ? Who would have thought.
Theyre not desperate. Sure they want to build quickly but this is also a capital hedge against the bubble bursting.
I wouldn’t use the word “desperate.”
Scaling is inefficient.
For training, it takes a ton of work to even get half-decent utilization across a bunch of servers, and it makes any sort of experimentation with architectures immensely more difficult.
Hence allegations that some GPUs are assigned “busywork” just to meet utilization quotas from the hardware seller.
For inference, scale isn’t so important. But the demand for tokens is self inflicted: from Meta shoving chatbots in ramdom places in software, and from their architecture being archaic and inefficient.
In other words, none of this has to be. It’s just the whims of one insecure man, surrounded by sycophantic tech bros, who’s feeling FOMO but doesn’t understand transformers LLMs at all.
If he had half a brain, he wouldn’t have fired the team that literally founded the open weights LLM space.
But he’s also too rich to ever feel the consequences of bad decisions now.
Easy Mode Pop Up Copper Mine
Just think of the CoSt SaViNgS when 3 years from now and all that shiny new hardware is obsolete compared with the nvidia Orphan Crusher 3000, and instead of paying for a silly decommissioning and responsible recycling project you can just cover your eyes for 30 seconds and let the meth heads scour the site.
I remember when “data” was something useful, not yottabytes of fake mountain goat jumping videos and fart sounds.
All that shit is for training. They just want you to think it’s useless slop videos. The amount of data you can get on human psychology through those memes and videos is priceless. Y’all get caught up in the first layer of the onion/matrix every single time.
“data” was something useful
yottabytes of fake mountain goat jumping videos and fart sounds.
I want to taste the steel of a shotgun at the back of my throat with my toe on the trigger.
Man you guys would be surprised how normal these tent-systems are in all sorts of industry manufacturing stuff. Yes they’re “temporary” constructions, but in a very permanent kind of way. They’re insulated, heated/cooled, have cast concrete flooring, rated for surprisingly high winds etc. They can easily be used for years without issues.
100%. The optics definitely aren’t good though - those kinds of tents tend to spring to mind things like FEMA deployments or temporary accommodations for the military.
Maybe optimize the LLM to run on less compute?
Or just realize that nobody fucking likes LLMs as much as the Captains of Industry want us to believe, and that the true power of this technical domain lies in more targeted and bespoke ML model generation and usage.
ML is good and enables - and has enabled - some genuine generational leaps in science and technology. But LLMs are such a fucking waste of the technology’s potential. Not to mention, I’m extremely irritated that (largely due to Nvidia cornering the market) everyone is super gung-ho about a digital approach which amounts to brute-forcing neural nets digitally with shitloads of memory and highly-parallel compute, when it’s obvious to anyone with more than a passing familiarity with electrical engineering that an analog approach is going to be FAR more efficient in terms of resource and energy usage.
Yeah, for 4 and 8 bit quantization at least analog charge buckets or memristor-likes and analog multipliers would dramatically reduce substrate size, reduce power burn and speed up inference. Even better killer drones, here they come. Yay.
I mean… yeah, DARPA will probably be one of the first adopters of that stuff, it’s true. But DARPA is pretty much always a first adopter of any new tech, because they’re basically the research wing of the US military, and they have effectively infinite resources at their disposal (note: I am not debating whether or not that is a good thing here; simply stating that it is a thing). But just because they’ll likely do something military-ish with it first doesn’t mean that it’s a “bad” technology. The internet itself was, after all, initially a project of DARPA’s predecessor, ARPA, and was initially named “ARPAnet”.
maybe this is personal preference
?
Analog meaning think for yourself or what?
Analog as in analog signals vs digital signals. Reductively: circuitry designed to operate in a continuously variable electrical domain, as opposed to circuitry designed to operate in a clocked binary domain.
Analog is (with a LOT of handwaving) way closer to how biological neural nets (that is, actual neurological tissue) operates. This is one of many domains where the exploration of biomimicry could yield some incredible advantages in a lot of areas.
Stop talking sense when has good sense ever been the solution of choice.
Don’t worry, Chinese LLM vendors without access to the newest hardware will take care of that.
based,hopefully they use this to optimize local LLMS so i have higher tokens per second.
But everything’s computer!
If I was king they would have to run on 100% on-site solar and air cooling.
would be based
This seems very different to high-security data centers…
- I wouldn’t want my (business) data handled like that
- I wonder how well this could be defended against a roving gang of enterprising racoons that comes to liberate their precious RAM and GPUs 🦝
High security data centers are usually invisible, unless you know that some random building is a datacenter.
Its not business data, these are just ridiculously powered AI training computers.
If I’m not mistaken many recent datacenters are focused on inference rather than training. But it is often a bit of both.
I can hear the war cry already: “the greatest technician that’s ever lived”
I wonder if they’re flammable or inflammable?
Both if you’re lucky.
Yes
What a country!
I mean, they are worth millions a rack. Get some youngins with strong backs…
I love how Zuck always gets the short end of the stick.
Is it illegal to buy handkerchiefs, bottles of vodka, and a lighter?
Fill up a jerry can or two with petrol next time you fill up your car, and save the vodka for making martinis.
I’m not one to advocate for anything of course but I think it’s pretty reasonable to have at least handkerchiefs and a few lighters at home always. Buy the vodka on demand. Of course not a bad idea to stock up on vodka either, never know when you want to get drunk or disinfect a wound.
Might be a hot take, but vodka is one of the more desperate choices when looking to get drunk on your own time (at least in terms of taste). Rubbing alcohol for wounds is also far cheaper.
Not separately
Reading that China is quite advanced in AI also, and if these things are related, how are they handling things like data centers over there? Or are they not related?
China has a very different climate and landmass. The reason these companies keep trying to make datacenters in places where they’ll use all the water the residents need to survive, is because those places are the cheapest to build and opperate. Land in the desert is dirt-cheap (lol). China doesn’t have to build in the desert to build on cheap land, and so can build pretty much whereever they feel like it, including where water and electricity isn’t an issue.
Also, they’ve shown before that they don’t really have to give a shit about the lives of local residents. They probably (maybe) don’t want them to die, but relocation is always an option.
In the end we probably don’t know wether people are pissed about it or not, since we don’t get a lot of news from rural China.
Also, they’ve shown before that they don’t really have to give a shit about the lives of local residents. They probably (maybe) don’t want them to die, but relocation is always an option.
Learn US history a little. Read about the flooding of the Ozarks and hundreds of other regions of the US to build power dams.
And now there are a lot of laws to prevent it.
Yeah it just had me thinking. Thank you.
Lots of statesponsored datacenters being build in China. And of course with no way to say no to those.
And a majority of domestically produced Chinese RAM-chips are being funneled into Chinese datacenters (by government mandate).
