Comment by monster_truck
15 hours ago
Based on the leaps in local inference speed in the past month, which have been absurd, I'm p confident we're going to whiplash from compute constrained to storage constrained.
Bit apples to oranges, but it reminds me of all the fiber we installed in the late 90s, certain that per-strand capacity increases were years or decades out, only to get massively rugged
I expect the investments into AI driven mathematic discoveries that underpin compression efficiency will be a key investment area. Particularly at the data center scale rather than per device or per file level.
It's not going to be enough. The naive approach of a project I've been working on was pushing >10gbps over the local network, after a ton of work I got it back down under 1... and now it's processing so much more shit that I'm almost past 5 again! It compresses at >3:1 but the latency hit isn't suitable.
I get the impression the only reason there is renewed interest in photonics is because DCs are simply out of room (and power) to rack more servers and switches.
I 100% agree with your impression. For a good while to come there's going to be a bunch of Jevons Paradox to all of this, but adoption of architectural changes like that photonics adoption is exactly the type of adaption to circumvent bottlenecks I'm referring to. We're going to hit hundreds of bottlenecks and each one will inevitably breed new approaches and technology directions. And the forcing function won't be talking about them, but implementing them, seeing who wins and taking lessons.
pi-fs will solve all our data compression problems.