[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 For instance by reducing the duration of the government granted monopolies on chip technology that is obsolete well before the default duration of 20 years is over.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 reducing the duration of the government granted monopolies on chip technology that is obsolete well before the default duration of 20 years is over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.

[whimsicalism]

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

It's not a certainty that they 'make a shitload of money'. Reducing the right tail payoffs absolutely reduces the capital allocated to solve problems - many of which are risky bets.

Your solution absolutely decreases capital investment at the margin, this is indisputable and basic economics. Even worse when the taking is not due to some pre-existing law, so companies have to deal with the additional uncertainty of whether & when future people will decide in retrospect that they got too large a payoff and arbitrarily decide to take it from them.

[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.

[inetknght]

> y'all really don't understand how these actions would seriously harm capital markets and make it difficult for private capital

Reflexively, I count that harm as a feature. I don't like private capital markets because I've been screwed by private capital on multiple occasions.

But you are right: I don't understand how these actions would harm. So please do expand your concerns.

[freeone3000]

If we have public capital formation, we don’t necessarily need private capital. Private innovation in weather modelling isn’t outpacing government work by leaps and bounds, for instance.

[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.