[CardenB]

Doubtful that GPUs purchased today would be in use for a similar time scale. Govt investment would also drive the cost of GPUs up a great deal.

Not sure why a publicly accessible GPU cluster would be a better solution than the current system of research grants.

[ygjb]

Of course they won't. The investment in the Heavy Press Program was the initial build, and just citing one example, the Alcoa 50,000 ton forging press was built in 1955, operated until 2008, and needed ~$100M to get it operational again in 2012.

The investment was made to build the press, which created significant jobs and capital investment. The press, and others like it, were subsequently operated by and then sold to a private operator, which in turn enabled the massive expansion of both military manufacturing, and commercial aviation and other manufacturing.

The Heavy Press Program was a strategic investment that paid dividends by both advancing the state of the art in manufacturing at the time it was built, and improving manufacturing capacity.

A GPU cluster might not be the correct investment, but a strategic investment in increasing, for example, the availability of training data, or interoperability of tools, or ease of use for building, training, and distributing models would probably pay big dividends.

[dmix]

I don't think there's a shortage of capital for AI... probably the opposite

Of all the things to expand the scope of government spending why would they choose AI, or more specifically GPUs?

[devmor]

There may however, be a shortage of capital for open source AI, which is the subject under consideration.

As for the why... because there's no shortage of capital for AI. It sounds like the government would like to encourage redirecting that capital to something that's good for the economy at large, rather than good for the investors of a handful of Silicon Valley firms interested only in their own short term gains.

[hluska]

Look at it from the perspective of an elected official:

If it succeeds, you were ahead of the curve. If it fails, you were prudent enough to fund an investigation early. Either way, bleeding edge tech gives you a W.

[Geezus_42]

Or you wasted a bunch of tax payer money on some over hyped and over funded nonsense.

[ygjb]

Yeah. There is alot of over hyped and over funded nonsense that comes out of NASA. Some of it is hype from the marketing and press teams, other hype comes from misinterpretation of releases.

None of that changes that there have been major technical breakthroughs, and entire classes of products and services that didn't exist before those investments in NASA (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies for a short list). There are 15 departments and dozens of Agencies that comprise the US Federal government, many of whom make investments in science and technology as part of their mandates, and most of that is delivered through some structure of public-private partnerships.

What you see as over-hyped and over-funded nonsense could be the next ground breaking technology, and that is why we need both elected leaders who (at least in theory) represent the will of the people, and appointed, skilled bureaucrats who provide the elected leaders with the skills, domain expertise, and experience that the winners of the popularity contest probably don't have.

Yep, there will be waste, but at least with public funds there is the appearance of accountability that just doesn't exist with private sector funds.

[seunosewa]

You'll be long gone before they find out.

[hluska]

Which happens every single day in every government in the world.

[alickz]

how would you determine that without investigation?

[phatfish]

If it succeeds the idea gets sold to private corporations or the technology is made public and everyone thinks the corporation with the most popular version created it.

If it fails certain groups ensure everyone knows the government "wasted" taxpayer money.

[JumpCrisscross]

> A GPU cluster might not be the correct investment, but a strategic investment in increasing, for example, the availability of training data, or interoperability of tools, or ease of use for building, training, and distributing models would probably pay big dividends

Would you mind expanding on these options? Universal training data sounds intriguing.

[ygjb]

Sure, just on the training front, building and maintaining a broad corpus of properly managed training data with metadata that provides attribution (for example, content that is known to be human generated instead of model generated, what the source of data is for datasets such as weather data, census data, etc), and that also captures any licensing encumbrance so that consumers of the training data can be confident in their ability to use it without risk of legal challenge.

Much of this is already available to private sector entities, but having a publicly funded organization responsible for curating and publishing this would enable new entrants to quickly and easily get a foundation without having to scrape the internet again, especially given how rapidly model generated content is being published.

[mnahkies]

I think the EPC (energy performance certificate) dataset in the UK is a nice example of this. Anyone can download a full dataset of EPC data from https://epc.opendatacommunities.org/

Admittedly it hasn't been cleaned all that much - you still need to put a bit of effort into that (newer certificates tend to be better quality), but it's very low friction overall. I'd love to see them do this with more datasets

[randomdata]

If the public is going to go to all the trouble of doing something, why would that public not make it clear that there is no legal threat to using any data available?

The public is incredibly lazy, though. Don't expect them to do anything until their hand is forced, which doesn't bode well for the action to meet a desirable outcome.

[whimsicalism]

there are many things i think are more capital constrained, if the government is trying to subsidize things.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Doubtful that GPUs purchased today would be in use for a similar time scale

Totally agree. That doesn't mean it can't generate massive ROI.

> Govt investment would also drive the cost of GPUs up a great deal

Difficult to say this ex ante. On its own, yes. But it would displace some demand. And it could help boost chip production in the long run.

> Not sure why a publicly accessible GPU cluster would be a better solution than the current system of research grants

Those receiving the grants have to pay a private owner of the GPUs. That gatekeeping might be both problematic, if there is a conflict of interests, and inefficient. (Consider why the government runs its own supercomputers versus contracting everything to Oracle and IBM.)

[rvnx]

It would be better that the government removes IP on such technology for public use, like drugs got generics.

This way the government pays 2'500 USD per card, not 40'000 USD or whatever absurd.

[kube-system]

> It would be better that the government removes IP on such technology for public use, like drugs got generics.

20-25 year old drugs are a lot more useful than 20-25 year old GPUs, and the manufacturing supply chain is not a bottleneck.

There's no generics for the latest and greatest drugs, and a fancy gene therapy might run a lot more than $40k.

[JumpCrisscross]

> better that the government removes IP on such technology for public use, like drugs got generics

You want to punish NVIDIA for calling its shots correctly? You don't see the many ways that backfires?

[gpm]

No. But I do want to limit the amount we reward NVIDIA for calling the shots correctly to maximize the benefit to society. For instance by reducing the duration of the government granted monopolies on chip technology that is obsolete well before the default duration of 20 years is over.

That said, it strikes me that the actual limiting factor is fab capacity not nvidia's designs and we probably need to lift the monopolies preventing competition there if we want to reduce prices.

[JumpCrisscross]

> reducing the duration of the government granted monopolies on chip technology that is obsolete well before the default duration of 20 years is over

Why do you think these private entities are willing to invest the massive capital it takes to keep the frontier advancing at that rate?

> I do want to limit the amount we reward NVIDIA for calling the shots correctly to maximize the benefit to society

Why wouldn't NVIDIA be a solid steward of that capital given their track record?

[gpm]

> Why do you think these private entities are willing to invest the massive capital it takes to keep the frontier advancing at that rate?

Because whether they make 100x or 200x they make a shitload of money.

> Why wouldn't NVIDIA be a solid steward of that capital given their track record?

The problem isn't who is the steward of the capital. The problem is that economically efficient thing to do for a single company is (given sufficient fab capacity, and a monopoly) to raise prices to extract a greater share of the pie at the expense of shrinking the size of the pie. I'm not worried about who takes the profit, I'm worried about the size of the pie.

[salawat]

>Why wouldn't NVIDIA be a solid steward of that capital given their track record?

Past performance is not indicative of future results.

[tick_tock_tick]

> That said, it strikes me that the actual limiting factor is fab capacity not nvidia's designs and we probably need to lift the monopolies preventing competition there if we want to reduce prices.

Lol it's not "monopolies" limiting fab capacity. Existing fab companies can barely manage to stand-up a new fab in different cities. Fabs are impossibly complex and beyond risky to fund.

It's the kind of thing you'd put government money to making but it's so risky government really don't want to spend billions and fail so they give existing companies billions so if they fail it's not the governments fault.

[hluska]

So, if a private company is successful, you will nationalize its IP under some guise of maximizing the benefit to society? That form of government was tried once. It failed miserably.

Under your idea, we’ll try a badly broken economic philosophy again. And while we’re at it, we will completely stifle investment in innovation.

[whimsicalism]

there is no such thing as a lump-sum transfer, this will shift expectations and incentives going forward and make future large capital projects an increasingly uphill battle

[Teever]

There was a post[0] on here recently about how the US went from producing woefully insufficient numbers of aircraft to producing 300k by the end of world war 2.

One of the things that the post mentioned was the meager profit margin that the companies made during this time.

But the thing is that this set the America auto and aviation industry up to rule the world for decades.

A government going to a company and saying 'we need you to produce this product for us at a lower margin thab you'd like to' isn't the end of the world.

I don't know if this is one of those scenarios but they exist.

[0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-to-build-300000-a...

[rvnx]

In the case of NVIDIA it's even more sneaky.

They are an intellectual property company holding the rights on plans to make graphic cards, not even a company actually making graphic cards.

The government could launch an initiative "OpenGPU" or "OpenAI Accelerator", where the government orders GPUs from TSMC directly, without the middleman.

It may require some tweaking in the law to allow exception to intellectual property for "public interest".

[whimsicalism]

y'all really don't understand how these actions would seriously harm capital markets and make it difficult for private capital formation to produce innovations going forward.

[nickpsecurity]

They said remove legally-enforced monopolies on what they produce. Many of these big firms made their tech with millions to billions of taxpayer dollars at various points in time. If we’ve given them millions, shouldn’t we at least get to make independent implementations of the tech we already paid for?

[panarky]

To the extent these are incremental units that wouldn't have been sold absent the government program, it's difficult to see how NVIDIA is "harmed".

[latchkey]

> Those receiving the grants have to pay a private owner of the GPUs.

Along similar lines, I'm trying to build a developer credits program where I get whomever (AMD/Dell) to purchase credits on my super computers, that we then give away to developers to build solutions, which drives more demand for our hardware, and we commit to re-invest those credits back into more hardware. The idea is to create a win-win-win (us, them, you) developer flywheel ecosystem. It isn't a new idea at all, Nvidia and hyperscalers have been doing this for ages.

[jvanderbot]

A much better investment would be to (somehow) revolutionize production of chips for AI so that it's all cheaper, more reliable, and faster to stand up new generations of software and hardware codesign. This is probably much closer to the program mentioned in the top level comment: It wasn't to produce one type of thing, but to allow better production of any large thing from lighter alloys.

[photonthug]

> Not sure why a publicly accessible GPU cluster would be a better solution than the current system of research grants.

You mean a better solution than different teams paying AWS over and over, potentially spending 10x on rent rather than using all that cash as a down payment on actually owning hardware? I can't really speak for the total costs of depreciation/hardware maintenance but renting forever isn't usually a great alternative to buying.

[CardenB]

Do you have some information to share to support your bias against leasing especially with a depreciating asset?

[manux]

In Canada, all three major AI research centers use clusters created with public money. These clusters receive regular additional hardware as new generations of GPUs become available. Considering how these institutions work, I'm pretty confident they've considered the alternatives (renting, AWS, etc). So that's one data point.

[photonthug]

sure, I’ll hand it over after you spend your own time first to show that everything everywhere that’s owned instead of leased is a poor financial decision.

[vasili111]

AWS is not only hardware but also software, documentation, support and more.