AI Hardware, Explained

a16z Podcast

a16z

Science, Innovation, Business, Entrepreneurship, Culture, Disruption, Software Eating The World, Technology

4.4 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 27 July 2023

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 2011, Marc Andreessen said, “software is eating the world.” And in the last year, we’ve seen a new wave of generative AI, with some apps becoming some of the most swiftly adopted software products of all time. So if software is becoming more important than ever, hardware is following suit. In this episode – the first in our three-part series – we explore the terminology and technology that is now the backbone of the AI models taking the world by storm. We’ll explore what GPUs are, how they work, the key players like Nvidia competing for chip dominance, and also… whether Moore’s Law is dead? Look out for the rest of our series, where we dive even deeper; covering supply and demand mechanics, including why we can’t just “print” our way out of a shortage, how founders get access to inventory, whether they should own or rent, where open source plays a role, and of course… how much all of this truly costs!

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you look at the pure hardware statistics, so how many floating point operations per second can these chips do?
0:06.7	There's others that are very competitive with what NVIDIA has.
0:09.9	Are we now at the limits of lithography? I think it's very surprising.
0:14.0	Who would have thought that my gaming PC,
0:15.0	my Bitcoin miner, would eventually become a good AI engine.
0:18.0	Power is becoming an issue, he is becoming an issue,
0:20.0	and we need to rely more and more on parallel processes.
0:23.0	In 2011, Mark Andresen said,
0:27.0	software is eating the world.
0:29.0	And the decade that followed just solidified this notion,
0:33.0	but software infiltrating nearly every aspect of our lives.
0:37.4	The last year in particular introduced a new wave of generative AI,
0:41.6	with some apps becoming some of the most swiftly adopted
0:45.8	software products of all time. And just like all the other software that came
0:50.5	before it, AI software is fundamentally underpinned by the hard software that
0:55.0	software is fundamentally underpinned by the hardware that runs the underlying computation.
0:58.0	So if software is becoming more important than ever,
1:01.0	then hardware is following suit.
1:03.4	Plus, the world is constantly generating more data
1:07.6	and unlocking the full potential of these technologies
1:10.5	from longer context windows to multimodality means a constant need for faster and more resilient hardware.
1:18.0	And it's equally important for us to understand who builds and controls the supply of this resource,
	...

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