I'm not convinced, mostly because things like crypto, which I believe went into ASICs, were based on very slowly moving and mostly understood algorithms. LLMs and model architectures seems significantly more volatile. I wouldn't want to be working out the finer details of my chip rollout only to find a new paper/approach that give multiples of performance.

So I guess it depends on how much the latest-greatest model motivates people, and my read on the current churn is that developers are extremely unloyal to brand at this point and will jump to whoever has the best model. And as long as the best model is running on programmable GPUs, that will be the dominant form.

The tokens per second performance numbers coming from Cerebrus/Talas are several orders of magnitude higher than models running on GPUs, which is such a huge step change that it will enable many more uses of LLMs that are impractical otherwise. I.e. think about gamers and burning in an LLM chip on a game console like a future Play Station - it doesn't matter if its a frontier LLM if it allows them to talk to in game characters in real time and have the LLM drive the storyline. The devs may be limited to training/RLHFing legacy models, but the performance enables many more use cases.

Honestly, whether you think burning current SOTA to hardware is an overinvestment risk depends on what your definition of intelligence is. If you think intelligence is something that can grow like height such that 18 months from now we will basically be bowing down to machine god giants that are running on B200s, then investing in ASICs is the wrong move. However, if you you subscribe to the (very reasonable view) that intelligence is more like a round ball that we are trying to make as spherical as possible (ala Francois Chollet's writings), then at some point the ball will be smooth enough for most people and many tasks.

It takes about 18 months to go through the design, verification, and manufacturing process if you move at breakneck pace. Design could probably be sped up.

About 18 months ago the top model was GPT-4o. Not great by today's standards, but still good enough for many tasks (certainly a big chunk of chatbot queries). The current SOTA covers far more use cases, but importantly at a level that surpasses many thresholds of utility.

>I'm not convinced, mostly because things like crypto, which I believe went into ASICs, were based on very slowly moving and mostly understood algorithms.

Yesterday there's a news on a breakthrough for probabilistic computer with 1 million p-bits [1].

Since LLM is stochastic in nature, this type of new computer can be much better than ASIC for processing LLM data.

[1] Biggest Probabilistic Computer Turns Noise into Answers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48971938

The churn is an issue. For a while there, it felt like we were getting a new number format every month or two (e.g., fp4, ternary, etc.). That level of innovation works against moving things into hardware, or at least you need to be willing to spin hardware constantly.

I thought about the volatility, too. But here are some additional thoughts:

Many AI uses are not that volatile. I had a 20 minute conversation today with some company's AI phone assistant. It was extremely good and would have been very helpful if any of the dozen people it tried to route me to would have picked up their phone. That AI won't need to be upgraded for a very long time. There is no reason for it to have a cloud brain except to force a recurring revenue for the company selling it.

Hardcore gamers are constantly throwing down insane money on the latest hardware. The rest of us can get by for a couple years with whatever we bought when the last one broke. Yeah, it's not the latest, but it gets the job done. I wonder if AI has not already reached the point where a gen 10 CPU--uh, I mean a v3 AI model--will get the job done for the next year. If I really need the up-to-the-second latest abilities for a minute, I can fallback to a cloud brain @ 1M tokens/$. Why pay a monthly lease on a 5-year plan for a 4-door Ford Ranger as your daily commuter? Buy a Clio and rent an F-250 twice a year when you need the hauling/towing capabilities.

I think the gamble comes down to how many tokens need to be served on your best model, versus how many can be served in the cheapest/fastest way.

Imagine if Anthropic could give effectively unlimited access to Sonnet, for $20. Wouldn’t that be an appealing option for many users? I know I’d make a lot of use of it for agentic tasks, office work, summarization, etc; when right now I’d save quota for more important tasks.

Apparently Google and team will build ASICs to run Gemini even though they have TPUs and it’ll be somewhat dynamic since the weights can be made modular [1]

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/google-plan...

seems to me that we are at the asymtote for most usage. sure run the prompts that need the frontier on generic silicon but burning the fable 5 model into silicon could be perfectly viable