alt Hacker News> I am of the opinion that Nvidia's hit the wall with their current architecture
Based on what?
Their measured performance on things people care about keep going up, and their software stack keeps getting better and unlocking more performance on existing hardware
Inference tests: https://inferencemax.semianalysis.com/
Training tests: https://www.lightly.ai/blog/nvidia-b200-vs-h100
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/mi300x-vs-h100-vs-h200... (only H100, but vs AMD)
> but nothing about the industry's finances add up right now
Is that based just on the HN "it is lots of money so it can't possibly make sense" wisdom? Because the released numbers seem to indicate that inference providers and Anthropic are doing pretty well, and that OpenAI is really only losing money on inference because of the free ChatGPT usage.
Further, I'm sure most people heard the mention of an unnamed enterprise paying Anthropic $5000/month per developer on inference(!!) If a company if that cost insensitive is there any reason why Anthropic would bother to subsidize them?
Replies
> Is that based just on the HN "it is lots of money so it can't possibly make sense" wisdom?
I mean the amount of money invested across just a handful of AI companies is currently staggering and their respective revenues are no where near where they need to be. That’s a valid reason to be skeptical. How many times have we seen speculative investment of this magnitude? It’s shifting entire municipal and state economies in the US.
OpenAI alone is currently projected to burn over $100 billion by what? 2028 or 2029? Forgot what I read the other day. Tens of billions a year. That is a hell of a gamble by investors.
> Their measured performance on things people care about keep going up, and their software stack keeps getting better and unlocking more performance on existing hardware
I'm more concerned about fully-loaded dollars per token - including datacenter and power costs - rather than "does the chip go faster." If Nvidia couldn't make the chip go faster, there wouldn't be any debate, the question right now is "what is the cost of those improvements." I don't have the answer to that number, but the numbers going around for the costs of new datacenters doesn't give me a lot of optimism.
> Is that based just on the HN "it is lots of money so it can't possibly make sense" wisdom?
OpenAI has $1.15T in spend commitments over the next 10 years: https://tomtunguz.com/openai-hardware-spending-2025-2035/
As far as revenue, the released numbers from nearly anyone in this space are questionable - they're not public companies, we don't actually get to see inside the box. Torture the numbers right and they'll tell you anything you want to hear. What we _do_ get to see is, eg, Anthropic raising billions of dollars every ~3 months or so over the course of 2025. Maybe they're just that ambitious, but that's the kind of thing that makes me nervous.