What if we run out of GPU? Out of RAM? Out of electricity?

AWS is already raising GPU prices, that never happened before. What if there is war in Taiwan? What if we want to get serious about climate change and start saving energy for vital things ?

My guess is that, while they can do some cool stuff, we cannot afford LLMs in the long run.

▲

jiggawatts a day ago | parent [-]

> What if we run out of GPU?

These are not finite resources being mined from an ancient alien temple.

We can make new ones, better ones, and the main ingredients are sand and plastic. We're not going to run out of either any time soon.

Electricity constraints are a big problem in the near-term, but may sort themselves out in the long-term.

▲

twelvedogs a day ago | parent | next [-]

> main ingredients are sand and plastic

kinda ridiculous point, we're not running into gpu shortages because we don't have enough sand

▲

renegade-otter 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We already had a sand shortage. In 2019...

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is...

▲

Craighead a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Even funnier, there are legitimate shortages of usable sand.

▲

jiggawatts 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s my point: the key inputs are not materials but the high tech machinery and the skills to operate them.

▲

Draiken 14 hours ago | parent [-]

Which is better because?

We can't copy/paste a new ASML no matter how hard you try (aside from open sourcing all of their IPs). Even if you do, by the time you copy one generation of machine, they're on a new generation and you now still have the bottleneck on the same place.

Not to mention that with these monopolies they can just keep increasing prices ad infinitum.

	▲	jiggawatts 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		ASML's secret sauce is not that secret or uncopyable. The Chinese are already working on their clone of the Twinscan tools. Veritasium recently made a good video on the ASML machine design: https://youtu.be/MiUHjLxm3V0 The outcome may seem like magic, but the input is "simply" hard work and a big budget: billions of dollars and years of investment into tuning the parameters like droplet size, frequency, etc... The interviews make it clear that the real reason ASML's machines are (currently) unique is that few people had the vision, patience, and money to fund what seemed at the time impossible. The real magic was that ASML managed to hang on by a fingernail and get a successful result before the money ran out. Now that tin droplet EUV lasers have not only been demonstrated to be possible, but have become the essential component of a hugely profitable AI chip manufacturing industry, obtaining funding to develop a clone will be much easier.

▲

forty 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If the US is ready to start a war against Europe to invade Groenland, it's certainly because they need more sand and plastic? Of course in weight it's probably mostly sand and plastic but the interesting bit probably needs palladium, copper, boron, cobalt, tungsten, etc

▲

rhubarbtree 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well, also for military purposes.

And general imperialism.

▲

jiggawatts 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Greenland is Trump’s Ukraine. He’s jealous of Putin, that is all.

There is nothing in Greenland worth breaking up the alliances with Europe over.

Trump is too stupid to realise this, he just wants land like it’s a Civ game.

PS: An entire rack of the most expensive NVIDA equipment millions of dollars can buy has maybe a few grams of precious or rare metals in it. The cost of those is a maybe a dollar or two. They don’t even use gold any more!

The expensive part is making it, not the raw ingredients.

▲

imcritic 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That alliance costs money. It doesn't bring anything good in return: the USSR (that this alliance was created against) is long gone. Trump is a genius if he somehow manages to kill 2 birds with 1 stone: make OTHER parties of the alliance want to disband the alliance AND get some piece of land with a unique strategic position all to himself/U.S.

I think it's Putin who is going to be jealous of Trump, not the other way around.

▲

gylterud 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

One would then maybe suspect breaking up alliances with Europe is the point of the whole thing.

	▲	jiggawatts 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Some of the best advice I've ever heard is to look at how people act and ignore how they claim they act or their stated reasons for doing so. A corollary is that even a "technically false" model can better predict someone's actions than a "truthful one". Trump may not be a Russian agent, but he acts like one consistently. It's more effective to simply assume he's an agent of a foreign power, because that's the best predictor of his actions.