True, but there's a fun irony: the Rebels' X-Wings are powered by GPUs from a company that's... checks relationships ...also supplying the Empire.

NVIDIA's basically the galaxy's most successful arms dealer, selling to both sides while convincing everyone they're just "enabling innovation." The real rebels would be training audio models on potato-patched RP2040s. Brave souls, if they exist.

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garyfirestorm 4 hours ago | parent [-]

not sure about the irony - you can't really expect rebels to start their own weapons manufacturing lab right from converting ore into steel... these things are often supplied by a large manufacturer (which is often a monopoly) why is it any different for a startup to tap into nvidia's proverbial shovel in order to start digging for gold?

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tl2do 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Reply to garyfirestorm on HN:

Fair point — the X-Wing analogy breaks down when you look at actual insurgencies. Rebels absolutely use off-the-shelf weapons from whoever will sell to them.

But here's the thing: we're actually entering an era where "homebrew weapons" is becoming possible for inference. Apple's Neural Engine, Google's TPU, Qualcomm's Hexagon — these are NPUs shipping in billions of devices already. You've got startups like Syntiant making ultra-low-power inference chips for always-on voice, and even microcontroller vendors adding ML accelerators.

The "rebel" angle shifts from "manufacturing your own GPU" to "optimizing for the silicon that's already in your pocket." That's where things get interesting — running decent audio models on a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero or an ESP32 with an accelerator add-on.

Granted, training still needs the datacenter. But inference? We're getting to the point where "rebel infrastructure" is just "commodity hardware + smart optimization." I'm betting on that side.

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adithyassekhar 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Your reply has a 0% ai score yet the presence of that "reply to" text is concerning.

	▲	llbbdd 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I don't know why this would be surprising because anywhere purporting to be able to score like this is obviously lying to you