If hardware becomes the moat, the US frontier labs are screwed. We have AWS, Azure, GCP. All three have or are making inference silicon. LLMs become just another service in the public cloud's large service catalog, and open weight wins.
replyWhich makes sense to me. Selling a chatbot interface/model access to the general public was never going to be a viable long term play. You still need developers to wrap the models into specialized tools. Queue the Jobs quote "It's a feature, not a product."
The funniest thing would be if in a couple years LLMs just end up being another checkbox next to PostgreSQL and Kubernetes
replyThe big thing is, the western world has moved so much of the manufacturing to China and think a lot of people will not forgive Samsung and others, so I can see China owning a good portion of the supply chain.
reply> The big thing is, the western world has moved so much of the manufacturing to China
replyI built my career on Solaris and it got rugpulled by Linux.
That wasn’t because of software, it was because of hardware. Linux’s cost advantage existed because Sun hardware had huge margins, because their software was basically free.
AI will probably be a repeat of this. Whoever can come up with the hardware solution that minimizes the cost per token will win.
I believe the 5090 still holds this crown, but someone certainly knows better than I do.
While people fly to the US to buy Macs at a lower price and bring them back in their backpacks, I guess I'll be flying to HK to buy a Chinese GPU rather sooner than later...
replyFortunately, Solaris skills map to Linux pretty cleanly.
replybut not all tokens are equal and vertical integration is the name of the game. Solaris did not lose to Linux, it lost to the LAMP stack on commodity x86 hardware. without the "AMP" part, Linux would've been dead in the water.
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