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No issue next week due to an anticipated food coma.
GPUs are CAPEX; CAPEX is Increasingly GPUs
John Luttig has an excellent piece entitled “NVIVIA Envy” examining GPU supply and demand today and into the future. In particular he tries to triangulate hypercloud investment and says “each player spends ~20-35% of data center capex on GPU build-outs”. That might be a little high given we’re really only seeing a CAPEX spike at Microsoft. He suggests the hyperclouds are buying half of all H100s and Microsoft was likely 29% of NVIDIA’s data center revenue in the most recent quarter. Like everyone, he mulls the question of when GPU scarcity turns into a glut.
Previous: Q3 Cloud CAPEX, Q2 Cloud CAPEX, The Google CAPEX Mystery, Follow the CAPEX: Cloud Table Stakes 2022 Retrospective
re:Invent or irrelevant?
The annual AWS developer conference approaches at the end of this month. Last year’s re:Invent keynote was pretty tedious, with innovation going increasingly asymptotic. But the next day, Open AI launched ChatGPT, resetting the industry focus and irritating AWS to no end (industry leaders hate it when something new disrupts their comfortable way of life and leadership status — I learned that at Microsoft in 1995).
This year AWS no doubt will loudly and repeatedly proclaim they are a player in generative AI. (Maybe they’ll even take their long awaited “fourth step“). The question is whether they will have code to back up all their words and demonstrate they’re on the frontier. With Google luring Anthropic back to a non-exclusive position, Amazon either needs to have made phenomenal progress on internal development, or we’re going to be back to a lot of arm waving about being Switzerland, having a three-tier strategy and tired metaphors. Given their annual release cadence around this event, the pressure is on to deliver something this month that substantiates their claims to be relevant in the generative AI stack.
Previous: Scuttling Titan(ic), Scaling Olympus?, Anthropic Adds Billions For More Existential AI Hand-wringing, Culture Clash Conjecture: Amazon and Anthropic, Titan or Titanic?, The Amazon AI Inferiority Complex
BREAKING: Depreciation Schedules
NVIDIA announces the H200, a successor to the much coveted H100. Awaiting word on how this impacts the GPU collaterization market with their assumption H100s have a six year useful life.
Previous: Depreciation Schedules Meet Moore’s Law, GPUs as an Asset Class, GPUs Are Better Than Any Financial Asset (For Now), Brother, Where Art Thy GPUs?
BREAKING: EU Considers Regulating Screen Colors
The stigma endures! Once the EU finishes its search engine, cloud computing service and LLM, maybe they can do a messaging system?
When “Move Fast and Regulate Things” Breaks Down
Being first provided at least some plausible excuse for having no idea what you were regulating. But clueless and last? Embarrassing.
Previous: AI Regulation: Move Fast and Regulate Things
Tumbleweeds In The Metaverse
JP Morgan shutters its metaverse thingy:
In early 2022, JPMorgan Chase proudly claimed it was the first bank to enter the metaverse.
Inside a crypto-focused virtual world called Decentraland, users could visit the swanky Onyx lounge, named after the bank’s blockchain operations, to mingle with fellow crypto enthusiasts and watch videos of the bank’s experts discussing crypto markets.
A virtual portrait of a beaming Jamie Dimon hung on the wall just below the Onyx logo. A digital tiger roamed the floor. At the time, the bank said that the metaverse could “lead to uniquely new services and business models” and that “the virtual real estate market could start seeing services much like in the physical world, including credit, mortgages and rental agreements.”
But in June, just a year and a half after it opened, JPMorgan quietly shut down the Onyx lounge as its visitor numbers sank toward zero.
I may have missed the window to write up my dream of applying a Georgist tax regime to the metaverse.
Previous: Things I Don’t Understand: Pricey Metaverse Real Estate, Things I Still Don’t Understand: Pricey Metaverse Real Estate
Related: The ‘Georgists’ Are Out There, and They Want to Tax Your Land
IBM Touchy About Being Associated With Nazis
Perhaps with good cause.
Related: IBM Screws Employees, Again