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Cake day: October 23rd, 2024

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  • old (1 year = 1000 years in AI) accusation not relevant to expected upcoming deepseek breakthrough model. Distillation is used to make smaller models, and they are always crap compared to training on open data. Distillation is not a common technique anymore, though it’s hard to prove that more tokens wouldn’t be “cheat code”

    This is more a desperation play from US models, even as youtube is in full, “buy $200/month subscriptions now or die” mode.













  • This is without grid connection. If grid connected, and wholesale exported electricity revenue of 15c/kwh on cold sunny winter day or summer heat wave (72 days potential) would be 3.7 times more profitable than H2 electrolysis (assuming only $2/kg revenue), and generate over $1000/kw. Recent winter storm in PJM area spiked to $3/kwh. It wasn’t necessarily sunny during spike, but if there is a wholesale participation contract, paying employee BEV owners a huge premium is still way more than 15c/kwh. There were very cold sunny places with $1/kwh after the storm. Can consider closing the datacenter those days, but the large battery, can also monetize peak scarcity during the storm.



  • Wanting to sell to China just means that demand isn’t exceeding supply, or maybe even that they have access to more supply that they’d use if they could sell to China, which is a massive market. Or even if they don’t have any excess supply, higher demand means they can set higher prices and still expect to sell all inventory.

    Nvidia has to sell to a Chinese buyer for 25% more than a US buyer would pay to have equivalent profit. It’s certainly possible that China is willing to pay more than that difference, but US private sector is supposed to be in desperation mode for skynet, in addition to having direct white house access of lobbying against China for mere trinkets in tribute. MSFT and others have the power to tell whitehouse/other republicans that they want to buy the H200s instead, and amplify warmongering BS as the reason. They just don’t want to buy them.

    Like the US car companies wanting to sell cars in China doesn’t imply that they are unable to sell cars in the US, it just means they want to sell cars to China and the US.

    US car companies are not supply constrained, including some of them with factories in China, and aren’t prohibited from selling all of their cars there if they were competitive. Nvidia has not been making H200s recently. It has astronomical record inventory levels (likely H200s based on lobbying win). Thier H20 cards that they sold to China the last 2 years, are the best value inference cards on ebay from China, but Americans were not allowed to buy them directly. Since about half of Nvidia GPUs are assembled in China, they have 0 problem with black market access to them, and massive secret Singapore customers of Nvidia are likely them directly profiting from Chinese black market with payment to Nvidia instead of pilferage of GPUs. I get that B200s B300s are better value/FLOP than H200s, but H200s could be priced to Americans/colonies on the same/similar $/flop, and if US/MSFT was really supply constrained, they’d buy or lobby government to force Nvidia to sell them at good $/flop. The Nvidia corruption is also likely to create new H200 production making newer GPUs “scarcer”


  • Microsoft’s finance chief, Amy Hood, argued that the cloud result could have been higher if it had allocated more data center infrastructure to customers rather than prioritizing its in-house needs.

    This is 98% chance a lie. Refusing azure clients wasn’t happening. They are saying the dedicated GPUs to copilot 365/windows/bing, but they would just slow tokens/second delivery or raise prices if they were constrained. Open AI/copilot service is flattening out is the far more likely explanation, and China/Anthropic/Google gaining share is apparent with frontend and LLM innovation.

    That said, windows 11 copilot is going at about 7tps on simple queries about its QOS, and slow service of paid models could impact azure. In Nov 25, they did drop big customer volume discounts. There were big price increases earlier in the year, so growth was in part pricing growth, and likely a drop in usage volume from previous quarter, or at least very stable. The AI frenzy, mostly openAI/msft/oracle/coreweave block of absurdly impossible capacity growth depends on keeping up with supposedly massive (token) demand growth. There are still a lot of free alternatives in the space, and app download figures usually accompany free promotional usage of latest breakthrough model (sora2 was free use on release. kilo code this week has free Kimi K2.5. Other coding tools have fully free or generous free tiers)

    Overall, this, and highly promotional industry, means its very hard for datacenter/LLMs to meet the hype. Deepseek 4 is hyped as a big leap forward, to be released in a couple of weeks. Everything AI boom is likely a lie, and Nvidia bribing Trump to sell H200s to China, at 25% export tariff, is proof of incapacity or unwillingness of US industry to deploy them.