Comment by repelsteeltje
5 hours ago
Today's tech echoes 1960-1970 mainframe era: very centralized around a handful of companies controlling "massive cloud compute" in bespoke mainframe-like topology.
All of that will all be legacy in a couple of years. Today's B200 clusters are tomorrow's e-waste. Decentralization might happen gradually or abruptly. But to me it's obvious that we'll be thinking of high-tech tensor processors and GPUs the way we thought of individual transistors and tube amplifiers in the 1980s.
If AI turns out to be the revolution it purports to be, than the underlying hardware will change much more rapidly than it did with ICs and microprocessors in the late 1970s. Today's hot is tomorrow's junk.
> Today's B200 clusters are tomorrow's e-waste.
Hardware depreciation timescales are actually getting longer, not shorter, because frontier hardware like B200 clusters is highly bottlenecked. It's not just a RAMpocalypse out there, we're seeing early signs of production bottlenecks with GPUs and maybe even CPUs.
Which, in itself, is a major crack that AI has caused in the delicate foundation of our technological society.
One thing that is potentially different this time is that Moore's Law has stopped scaling. Computers aren't getting smaller exponentially. They're getting bigger with multiple chips glued together to make up for Moore's Law.
...But there's a new world dawning for photonic chips.
No reason to expect Moore's observation to apply there (though, maybe?), but it will have big implications for power usage.
Photonic chips allow computers to get bigger, not smaller.