Comment by rwmj

5 months ago

Aren't Google's TPUs a bit like a research project with practical applications as a nice side effect?

All of Google ML runs on TPUs tied to $ billions in revenue. You make it sound like TPUs are a Google X startup that's going to get killed tomorrow.

  • What revenue is that? Hardly anyone's paying for Google's AI directly, and it doesn't seem to have dramatically changed their ad business.

    • GP said ML, not Ai - Google’s entire search and ad businesses are run on ML, as are many of the moonshots of alphabet (deep mind, Waymo, etc).

Why do you say that? They are on their seventh iteration of hardware and even from the beginning (according to the article) they were designed to serve Google AI needs.

My take is "sell access to TPUs on Google cloud" is the nice side effect.

I think you're thinking of the coral ones. The only ones they've sold directly to the public.