High Signal Podcasts Evidence ledger
Method
Browse
← Back to evidence

Evidence receipt / belief

Published · transcript-backed

Alessio Fanelli: belief

17 Nov 2023 Latent Space The State of Silicon and the GPU Poors - with Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis

“I think the startup's point is the most interesting, right? You mentioned companies that are GPU poor, they raise a lot of money, and there's a lot of startups out there that are GPU poor and did not raise a lot of money.”

— Alessio Fanelli

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Alessio Fanelli
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
17 Nov 2023
Publisher
Latent Space

Transcript context

…Yeah, yeah, so I think what you're referring to is that like network speed is increased Much slower than the other two. Than flops, yeah, and bandwidth, yeah, yeah. And yeah, that's a tremendous problem in the industry, right? That's why NVIDIA bought a networking company, that's why Broadcom is working on Google's chip right now, but of course on Meta's internal AI chip, which they're on the second generation of, working on that, and what's the main thing that Meta's doing interesting is networking stuff, right? Multiplying tensors is kind of, there's a lot of people who've made good matrix multiply units, right? But it's about like getting good utilization out of those and interfacing with the memory and interfacing with other chips really efficiently makes designing these chips very hard. Most of the startups obviously have not done that really well. I think the startup's point is the most interesting, right? You mentioned companies that are GPU poor, they raise a lot of money, and there's a lot of startups out there that are GPU poor and did not raise a lot of money. What should they do? How do you see like the space dividing? Are we just supposed to wait for like the big labs to do a lot of this work with a lot of the GPUs? What's like the GPU poor's beautiful version of the article? Open AI, who everyone would be like, oh yeah, they have more GPUs than anyone else, right? But they have a lot less flops than Google, right? That was the point of the thing, but not just them, it's like, okay, it's like a relative totem pole, right? And of course, Google doesn't use GPUs as much for training and inference, they do use some, but mostly TPUs. So kind of like, the whole point is that everyone is GPU poor because we're going to continue to scale faster and faster and faster and faster, and compute will always be a bottleneck, just like data will always be a bottleneck. You can have the best data set in the world and you can always have a better one. And same with, you have the biggest compute system in the world, but you'll always want a better one. And so it's like, there's things that like Mistral, they trained a fricking awesome model on relatively fewer GPUs, right? And now they're scaling up higher and higher and higher, right? There's a lot that the GPU poor can do though, right? We all have phones, we all have laptops, right? There is a world for running GPUs or models on device. The replet folks are trying to do stuff like that. Their models, they can't follow scaling laws, right? Why? Because there's a fundamental limit to how much memory bandwidth and capacity you can get on a laptop or a phone. You know, I mentioned the ratio of flops to bandwidth on a GPU is actually really good compared to like a MacBook or like a phone. To run Llama 70 billion requires two terabytes a second of memory bandwidth, 2.1 at human reading speed. Yeah, but my phone has like 50 gigabytes a second. Your laptop, even if you have an M1 Ultra has what, like, I don't remember, like a couple hundred gigabytes a second of memory bandwidth. You can't run Llama 70B just by doing the classical thing. So there's like, there's stuff like speculative decoding, you know, together did something really cool. And they put it in the open source, of course, Medusa, right? Like things like that, that are, you know, they work on batch size one, they don't work on batch size, you know, high. And so there's like the world of like cloud inference. And so in the cloud, it's all about what memory bandwidth and MFU I can achieve. Whereas on the edge, I don't think Google is going to deploy a model that I can run on my laptop to help me with code or help me with, you know, X, Y, Z, they're always going to want to run it in a cloud for control. Or maybe they let it run on the device, but it's like only their pixel phone, you know, it's kind of like a walled garden thing. There's obviously a lot of reasons to do other things for security, for openness, to not be at the whims of a trillion dollar plus company who wants my data, right? You know, there's a lot of stuff to be done there. And I think folks like Repl.it, they open source their model, right? Things like together, I just mentioned, right, that developing Medusa, that didn't take much GPU at all, right?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.

Search evidence