Forget tiny "chips". You need to think BIGGER.
8th April 2024
Welcome to AI Collision 💥,
In today’s collision between AI and our world:
Chips aren’t little things, they’re BIG
Free Netflix… at a cost
Elon’s fake news
If that’s enough to get the servers racking, read on…
AI Collision 💥 the race to one trillion
Moore’s Law – you might have heard of it before. If not, here’s the lowdown…
It was first described by Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel, in 1965.
He observed that the number of transistors on computer chips doubles approximately every two years. This trend isn’t a law of nature (like gravity) but rather a long-term observation of how technology evolves.
Moore’s original graph, drawn in 1965, showed this regularity on a logarithmic scale, showing the exponential growth of transistor count.
He hypothesized that this relationship would continue for at least a decade, and he was right.
For over half a century, Moore’s Law has held true. Transistor counts have indeed doubled roughly every two years, leading to more powerful and efficient computers.
However, surely at some point Moore’s Law needs to simply be physically impossible… right?
RIGHT?
After all, Nvidia’s B200 chip, which the company debuted just a few weeks ago, has 208 billion transistors. That means by 2030 we should have 1.664 trillion transistors on a chip.
Honestly I have no idea if that’s possible. Maybe, probably. Although some seriously influential people have said maybe not.
Even Nvidia’s CEO/founder, Jensen Huang, said in 2022 that “Moore’s Law is dead”. That’s quite something considering less than two years later his company dropped the B200 on everyone…
But what I’m starting to see more and more is a revitalisation of the idea that perhaps Moore’s Law isn’t dead, and that it’s not slowing.
Instead we’re starting to rethink the idea of what a “chip” is and how we can mash as many transistors in a tiny space and then mash as many chips as we can into one giga-chip.
Moore’s Law was all about the idea of getting smaller with greater efficiency and processing power. But what if the solution to Moore’s Law keeping on keeping on is to think about chips that are BIGGER?
What if the idea of a “chip” isn’t nanometre scale anymore but square-kilometre scale?
Maybe the next great “chip” isn’t 4nm but instead around 0.04km2.
Note: that’s 40,000 square metres for what it’s worth.
Now admittedly a 0.04km2 “chip” isn’t going to fit in your phone. But maybe it won’t have to. Now when I talk about chips at that scale what I really mean is a data centre.
Perhaps in order to really start to comprehend the path forward for processing power and Moore’s Law we need to start talking about data centres as chips. Or at the very least talking about a server rack as a chip.
We covered Nvidia’s new B200 chips a couple of weeks ago when the company held its GTC developers conference. If you missed that bumper broadcast, make sure to check it out here.
What you’ll notice is that Nvidia talked a lot about the B200 chip. But it also spoke a lot about its Blackwell “platform”.
And when it speaks of Blackwell it isn’t really talking “chips” and it doesn’t show a tiny little thing in the hand. When it speaks about the power of Blackwell it means this…
So when Nvidia talks about Blackwell GPU architecture and companies adopting Blackwell, this is what it’s talking about.
It’s why Nvidia’s press release has the following people singing the praises of the company in it:
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google
Andy Jassy, president and CEO of Amazon
Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Technologies
Demis Hassabis, cofounder and CEO of Google DeepMind
Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta
Satya Nadella, executive chairman and CEO of Microsoft
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
Larry Ellison, chairman and CTO of Oracle
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and xAI.
And as Elon puts it, “There is currently nothing better than NVIDIA hardware for AI.”
So for me, forget about “chips” in the way in which we’ve always thought about them. I say, think bigger literally.
Which means once we get our head around the direction of processing power, the march towards one trillion transistors and the scale of what next-generation “chips” really look like, then the idea of a server or even data centre-as-a-chip (DCaaC) isn’t that wild.
It also means that when you start to think of the importance of a data centre and what goes into making that thing “chip like” then you start to figure out that the rising demand for ancillary industries and companies to make next-gen “chips” opens up a world of investment potential.
This coming Thursday I’m going to show you what some of those companies look like, including one involved in cooling that has been one of the stock market’s best performers in the last year that almost no one knows about.
There might not be anything better than Nvidia hardware for AI right now, but I guarantee you that without some of these other companies and other industries, Nvidia is nowhere near as important and effective and valuable as it currently is.
AI gone wild 🤪
Admittedly it’s hard to keep track of all the anti-trust lawsuits getting filed against big tech at the moment.
There was one against Apple, one against Google, and there’s also one currently against Meta.
They’re a funny beast the anti-trust suits. The free market is free until something becomes so big and powerful that it’s no longer allowed to be free in the market.
We encourage growth and companies becoming roaring successes… until a certain point when they become the enemy.
Anyway, Meta, which is literally a company that was built from nothing into one of the most powerful companies on earth, is in the middle of an anti-trust suit where some interesting revelations have come to light.
Meta refutes these allegations for what it’s worth, but the circulating news over the weekend was that Facebook (Meta) had sold user data to Netflix – or at least given Netflix access to users’ direct messages.
As creepy as that sounds – and it’s wrong on a number of levels if proven to be true, though isn’t surprising on a number of levels – it does reinforce the importance of your data.
It’s one thing that Facebook knows a lot about you and most certainly trains its AI on your data. But to unlock data to an external company, one as big and data-fed as Netflix, it is an interesting outcome (if proven to be true).
When I look at my message history though, it makes more and more sense. My messages (in no particular order) are typically about work, golf, F1 and movies.
Netflix is in the business of content. Content creation, content acquisition, content hoarding. The company wants to bring you into the Netflix ecosystem and never let you go.
I’ve written a lot about Netflix over the years and how I always saw it heading deeper into gaming and live sports. That’s now just starting to come to fruition. I might republish some of that old content so you can see how years out you can see the direction that big tech takes and moves in.
But as I say, the only way they get you in, keep you in and keep you paying, is to provide content that matters.
Sports matter to people, gaming matters to people, but when it comes to TV and movie content, Netflix has had an on-and-off relationship with people.
Netflix has spent up big for the occasional hit, but clearly it wants to try to figure out the perfect formula for success. That means it’ll likely be training its AI or at least leveraging someone else’s AI (maybe Meta’s) to figure out what to spend up on next.
After the success of “The Gentlemen” series, which broke Netflix records by getting 44 million views in just four weeks, maybe its data skimming has proven to be quite useful…
Still, you have to ask, how much data would you be prepared to share with a company like Netflix if it asked and paid for it?
I don’t want a company stealing access to my messages, that’s just shady and wrong. But if Netflix said to me, “Hey Sam, here’s six months of Netflix on us if we can get you to share with us any messages that are related to movies and TV shows,” then I’d maybe be up for that.
Big tech gets it wrong when they think they’re bigger than their customers. But if one of them were to turn around and maybe think about the customer first, these lawsuits would probably end up as a relic of the past.
What do you think? Would you trade a bit of data for some gratis months of Netflix?
Boomers & Busters 💰
AI and AI-related stocks moving and shaking up the markets this week. (All performance data below over the rolling week).
Boom 📈
Veritone (NASDAQ:VERI) up 19%
Brainchip (ASX:BRN) up 12%
Zeta Global Holdings (NYSE:ZETA) up 11%
Bust 📉
Lantern Pharma (NASDAQ:LTRN) down 11%
WiMi Hologram Cloud (NASDAQ:WIMI) down 14%
Predictive Oncology (NASDAQ:POAI) down 23%
From the hive mind 🧠
Remember that saying regarding AI, “crap data in equals crap data out”? Well we do need to be careful of what our AI “feeds” on and what it cooks up for us. And for all the things Elon Musk does, when something like this happens, you’ve really got to wonder what our AI-infused social media looks like in a few years’ time.
While on the subject of data, if you think the race was on to build the best AI, the real race is on to see who can buy up all the training data.
Hates crypto, loves AI. I mean he is in control of a lot of money, a lot of people and a lot of what the market thinks, reacts to and does. So you can’t ignore what he says, and sometimes he’ll be right, sometimes wrong. On AI though, he’s probably closer to the mark than he’s been with bitcoin.
Artificial Polltelligence 🗳️
Today’s poll is supposed to be the results of last week’s poll. But then I got all crazy and we did back-to-back polls last week.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I’m going to have a poll today that will last two days. Then we’ll get back onto our regular poll schedule come Thursday.
So, for now…
Answer me this…
Weirdest AI image of the day
Give this movie a title – r/Weirddallee
ChatGPT’s random quote of the day
“Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master.” – Steve Jobs
Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to leave comments and questions below,
Sam Volkering
Editor-in-Chief
AI Collision
Give this movie a title -"Told you - you should have listened to Sam!"
Interesting selection of thoughts. Looking forward to hearing more thoughts on the data centre support industries. AI, chips, big chips, data centres, brain data capture, bigger chips, trans-humanism expansion - so much to take in and form opinions on!! Time for a coffee!