[dsign]

The thing I like the most about the current AI wave is the pressure is putting on computing hardware. Yes, mobile phones with long battery lives are cool and all of that, but most cool things I like are locked behind huge computational requirements.

[TaylorAlexander]

Agree. I work in robotics and we never have enough compute. I want to see us get to the point where the most advanced robot ever has all the compute it needs onboard, and that means huge growth in compute density and efficiency are needed.

[ben_w]

That's genuinely surprising.

What sort of on-board compute do you typically have today?

[RugnirViking]

a common example from my robotics experience (mainly mobile robots) has been getting something powerful enough to run our image recognition/interpreting sensor data. We often have something like several microprocessors (think:arduino equivalent running c++ or c) which run all the motor control etc and a high level system (used to often be raspberry pi, now more often nvidia jetson nano) listening to all of those and using most of it's computing power on some kind of sensor data, usually image recognition or processing TOF camera/lidar/radar data etc. We often have to optimise hard to get a couple of cycles or "frames" per second with these, which really puts limitations on how robots respond (250ms delay is veeeery noticable, especially if it's in obstacle avoidance - relatively common)

[zamnos]

Limiting ourselves to onboard compute available on mobile robots is one thing, but even for fixed installation robots, aka an arm in a factory where space and power aren't limited, we're very much still limited by compute capacity. Trying to use robots to do something as simple as folding clothes still cannot be done at a reasonable speed. Yeah, on a personal level, just buck up and spend the 20 minutes folding your clothes, or hire a maid to do it for you, but the complexity of automating the task of folding clothes by a robot is a stand in for other tasks in industry that we still can't automate because the complexity is still too high for our current computing power, and have to hire a human for.

Researchers at US Berkeley came out with the algorithm they named SpeedFolding in October of last year. Watch https://youtu.be/UTMT2WAUlRw?t=511 and then realize that linked excerpt is sped up 9x.

If we had 9x faster compute we could have laundry folding robots which is one thing, but that amount of compute would enable robots to do tons more tasks in industry.

[mlsu]

Robotics is a double whammy, you have compute problems but you also have actuation.

Getting robots to move quickly is easy; getting them to move quickly to exactly where you want them, or with exactly as much force... that is much, much more difficult. Double for mobile robots where you don't have a good energy source. If cost is an issue that is another dimension -- powerful and accurate actuators are extremely expensive.

[bick_nyers]

I don't work in the field but just to kind of put it into perspective, a 12v 100A LiFePO4 battery has 1200 Watts capacity and weighs 30 pounds. A typical gaming PC (which to be fair, is more willing to trade power for performance) consumes about 600 Watts per hour. Problem for a Tesla? Not so much. Problem for a lightweight drone? Definitely.

[idiotsecant]

ahhh the units in this post are making my eye twitch.

[imtringued]

I would be mad too, if my gaming PC was demanding 300 Watts of power but it took half an hour to ramp up ;)

[bick_nyers]

I know Watts per hour is not the right way to phrase it but I feel it helps for those that don't know. Also, I just don't like saying Amp. Hours :)

[idiotsecant]

Watts per hour implies watts/hour. Watt-hour implies a number of watts multiplied by a length of time. Also known as energy. Watts are power. Watt hours are energy. Two different things. Watts/hour is nothing.

[TaylorAlexander]

The NVIDIA Jetson boards are popular, but even with a full desktop processor and state of the art GPU, you can easily down them in data from a LIDAR sensor or a few cameras. Especially since robots may also need fast response times.

There is another reply to your comment that shares a lot of what I have experienced. You have so many pieces of code that need to run and a good handful of them are working on something like LIDAR point clouds with a million 3D points in them, plus some cameras running several different image recognition and segmentation algorithms, and you want to have fast cycle times, it just all adds up. Every serious robot I have ever worked on is maxing out its system, even ones at Google X with a full desktop CPU, a high end NVIDIA graphics card, and a couple secondary ARM CPUs.

[ben_w]

Thanks! :)

That definitely helps me understand why the footage of the robots in this video had to be sped up: https://youtu.be/Ybk8hxKeMYQ

[aqme28]

Crazy to me that as soon as one GPU wave is dying (crypto), another one is picking up slack.

[atleastoptimal]

Which is a good thing. So glad all that GPU compute is being used on cool stuff rather than running SHA-256 18 quintillion times

[kkielhofner]

Definitely a good thing but FYI it hasn't been profitable/feasible to mine bitcoin (SHA-256) on GPU for many many years as ASIC based miners have completely taken over. I've talked about it plenty on HN but any way you slice it crypto is an unbelievable waste of resources in every possible way regardless.

What really (finally) more or less killed GPU mining was the Ethereum move to PoS (Proof of Stake).

[DJBunnies]

They can’t both be cool?

[moffkalast]

Nothing cool in throwing away lots of resources for no reason. In fact there's substantial heating involved.

[nightfly]

One is a contest to waste the most resources, one has potential to actually have useful results

[super256]

Why do you think Bitcoin does not have useful results?

[idiotsecant]

Bitcoin has a use, but there are other options for consensus algorithms that don't waste as much energy as the citizens of a medium sized country and fill the same user case (and other expanded use cases). Why not just do that?

[ben_w]

Strictly speaking, the comment you're replying to doesn't say which of the two is a contest to waste resources and which has potential to have useful results.

[speedgoose]

Can you cite an useful result? I can't but I don't think that some people getting richer is useful.

[DJBunnies]

Well, I agree with you there.

[ben_w]

Only if you really like big numbers for the sake of them. Otherwise, one is just straight up snake oil[0], and the other… is kinda hard to tell yet, because while I'm really impressed, I don't know if it's {a toy, a tool, the first sign of a major transformation}.

[0] did you know the original snake oils contains more omega-3 and therefore improves cognitive function when compared to lard? I did not. But you can get omega-3 elsewhere, and the people who made the term synonymous with fraud didn't use those snakes, so…

[varispeed]

> running SHA-256 18 quintillion times

or games. People could have been studying or doing something more important than wasting time and energy. I get that it is entertainment, but so are board games and that don't require mining rare earth minerals or putting pressure on the grid as you can always play board games with candles on.

[counttheforks]

Or TV shows or movies. People could have been studying or doing something more important than wasting time and energy.

Or going outside. People could have been studying or doing something more important than wasting time and energy.

Or not being locked in the education facility. People could have been studying or doing something more important than wasting time and energy.

[kkielhofner]

I'm of two minds on this. I'm not a gamer so part of me thinks gaming is a complete waste of time and resources. Then again, the same could be said about almost any hobby/pastime.

That said, gaming is what gave us GPUs (which have developed for gaming over the course of decades) so that we can now utilize them for more interesting and "productive" applications.

So, for me, in the end I'm happy the PC gaming industry and user base has been pushing GPU capability.

[KMnO4]

Be careful. The gaming industry has successfully conditioned people into believing they need a $1500 GPU with the TDP of a microwave so they can play the next unfinished-at-release AAA title.

[mrtranscendence]

Monopoly by candlelight, just the future I had always envisioned.

[BizarroLand]

Why are you wasting candlestick on playing games? It's such a waste! Don't you know bees died to make that candle?

The most ecologically friendly thing you can do is go to sleep. If you want to play games, do it while the sun is out!

(/s, just in case)

[varispeed]

If more people played Monopoly, they would have realised the Western economy is at the stage were a few players bought all properties and utilities.

[saurik]

One day we'll find out that all of the VR, crypto, and maybe now AI bubbles were nothing but conspiracies being driven by big-GPU to keep their share price up.

[schaefer]

Speaking for myself, I have already gotten more use out of 2 weeks of chatgpt than I have out of 16 years of Bitcoin

[dividedbyzero]

Which is just what I'd expect to read on an influential tech forum if grandparent was in fact right.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

14. First Bitcoin was mined 14 years ago. And Bitcoins have not been mined with GPUs since 2013.

[arbitrary_name]

You pedantry reinforces the point, rather than diminishing it.

[taneq]

VR has been a godsend for forcing hardware, OS and driver developers to actually pay attention to jitter and max latency. If crypto means we get nice fast pretty games and fancy AI then I’m for it. :)

[toxicFork]

The universe was a hoax invented by a GPU company

[psychphysic]

DLSS and DLAA were at least, FSR proved that.

[messe]

Charlie Stross (cstross on here) had a fun blog post[1] about this phenomenon just a week and a half ago.

> As for what you should look to invest in?

> I'm sure it's just a coincidence that training neural networks and mining cryptocurrencies are both applications that benefit from very large arrays of GPUs. [...]

> If I was a VC I'd be hiring complexity theory nerds to figure out what areas of research are promising once you have Yottaflops of numerical processing power available, then I'd be placing bets on the GPU manufacturers going there

[1]: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/02/place-y...

[favaq]

Gee, it's almost as if GPUs are useful.

[tnzk]

Indeed, except for processing graphics.

[nirav72]

For most part of the 20th, a bulk of the energy humanity was able to extract was used for industrialization. Now it seems that a vast bulk of the energy being extracted will go towards computation.

[xmcqdpt2]

I doubt it frankly. Computation consumes a lot of energy, true, but it is dwarfed by how much energy we use in transportation and food production. Energy use per capita in most of the Global North is about 75,000kWh per year,

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use

That's like the average person running 27 NVIDIA A100s at max capacity at all times!

[vasco]

Yeah but every time we discover a new interesting thing to do with computers the requirements go up by several orders of magnitude. How many more orders of magnitude of energy can we spend on food production from here with current projections of world population to peak in 2100?

[alchemist1e9]

The singularity and fusion power are probably interlinked because of this. Once one happens the other will and in either order.

[ben_w]

Doubt it, unless you include solar as fusion, but then we've already got it.

[college_physics]

GPU conspiracy or just the side-effect of the decline of Intel?

[swyx]

theres an economics theory of “supply creates its own demand”. we wanted to do ml, gpus were around for games, we repurposed them for ml, and ml architectures that benefit from gpus won the “hardware lottery” (influential paper from sara hooker in case you are unaware)

[layer8]

Just imagine if Bitcoin, GPT and Half-Life had come out at the same time.

[senttoschool]

Bitcoin miners don't use GPUs.

[layer8]

They did initially.

[pjmlp]

What we will get are specialized hardware, with not so open APIs anyway.

With a bunch of people trailling behind with "it kind of works" open alternatives.

[dsign]

It sounds like you are complaining about capitalism :-)

It's not so bad. Nvidia could come and say, "hey, I'm going to lock down your GPU so that you can only use it to render polygons in my whitelisted list of video-games, and then you pay us $$$$$$ to buy our 'datacenter' thingy for anything else." But if they do it, people will go and buy the competitor's product.

And yes, probably their 4090 are being bought by some rich kids with their parents' money, but I reckon most of it are sales to professionals, people who would justify their purchase decision with more than playing First-person-shooters. I for example play videogames with my gf, and we have equivalent GPUs. Hers is AMD and costs less than mine, even if it does the same, but I went for Nvidia so that PhysX were available and I could use Pytorch and Numba+GPU and even C++ CUDA. The moment Nvidia locks that down, I'll have to switch to AMD.

[zirgs]

> hey, I'm going to lock down your GPU so that you can only use it to render polygons in my whitelisted list of video-games

You just described gaming consoles.

[pjmlp]

As you will find on my comment history, I am perfectly fine with commercial products and APIs.

Good luck with AMD.

[HeartStrings]

John Hopkins are working on organoids that will replace silicon GPUs for AI.

[TecoAndJix]

Here is an article from JHU on that topic - https://hub.jhu.edu/2023/02/28/organoid-intelligence-biocomp...

[colordrops]

Reminds me of this Choose Your Own Adventure book from 1984. It was about how PCs had organic AI components and each was unique, and you happened to get your hands on a super intelligent one.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/755062

[ben_w]

As is one of the YouTubers I follow.

Meatcubator: https://youtu.be/Z_ZGq8Tah0k

Growing human brain cells: https://youtu.be/V2YDApNRK3g

[pelagicAustral]

If they can get pass these new ethical committees...

[BizarroLand]

I'm sure there are rat and mouse brain cells free for the taking from almost any pharmaceutical testing lab.

If organics is the only factor, I don't know why those wouldn't perform as well as human or ape brain cells.