The awareness of a poor return on investment is a good thing for society. We want to do more with fewer resources.
Making terrible decisions, such as investing in distractions for your company and consumers, and then letting your workforce pay the tab.. is the thing that is not great for society.
Who is the "we" here? Because the profit margin not being high enough is certainly not a problem for consumers. The only people who should care about that are the company's shareholders and "shareholders" certainly isn't synonymous with "society".
Making crazy changes like squeezing out every last dollar out of your existing, loyal customers (looking at any PE firm ever) certainly affects the wind I'd wager.
Absolutely, and plenty of companies have made that mistake.
But the point is locking up money in a 3% margin business doesn’t impress investors.
So you either need to improve the margin with lower costs or higher price (or both). Or bail from the market entirely and put your money in something that makes more money.
What makes more money? The investment is all in AI because TINA - There Is No Alternative. There's too much money in the system to cover all reasonable investments, so it fills up all reasonable investments and many unreasonable ones too.
Our society has a finite capacity to do projects and to run industrial processes. We want that finite capacity to provide as much quality of life as possible (and as much expansion of our capacity to do projects and run processes as possible), and achieving that is a thorny intellectual problem, which for many centuries in our society has been solved mostly by lawyers and judges knowledgeable about corporate law, stock markets, corporate managers, accountants and investors. This entire ecosystem is predicated on the assumption that investor will try to maximize their return of investment, which is strongly correlated with profit margin.
Is a low profit margin a problem for consumers or is it the company's "money grubbery" of not being satisfied with that profit margin that is causing the problem?
When XBOX fires a bunch of people and shutters studios leading to fewer games with worse support, that's a problem for consumers.
I think people often forget that in a society we rely on companies making and serving things. They make our food and our medicine and build our homes and make our games. It's a good thing when their finances are healthy. It's a bad thing when they form monopolies and rent-seek.
How is making more and more every fiscal year "healthy"?
This is madness and it doesn't make any sense besides the one case where you pursue a monopoly.
All of this has nothing to do with the consumer of the product besides the fact that he'll get a worse and worse product while simultaneously being forced to pay more and more. Enshitification is aresult of this "healthy" business culture.
> How is making more and more every fiscal year "healthy"?
Because if they didn't make a return on their investment, they would invest their money elsewhere. When you have money you want a return. You can invest it into games, or cars, or phones, or mining, or healthcare. Whatever you invest it in, you want to be justified for your risk because you can lose money. Sometimes you can lose all of it. If you're really risk averse you just put it all into a bank account on low interest. A lot of European investors do this, which is why their technological innovations are falling well behind the US.
If you want more games with better support, we all benefit if they're making a profit on their investments.
Once again, what is the actual problem here? The company was making a profit at their current employment level. They are laying people off and shuttering studios because that profit isn't enough for them. This entire argument keeps coming back to "money grubbery".
One of those terrible decisions was probably hiring too many developers, how do you suggest they fix that issue, besides changing leadership?
Many of those developers may not have the job elsewhere, or job paying much less. They now have the experience working in a proper software engineering environment.
What type of company are you talking about here? Granted, nowadays I mostly interact with ML-adjacent companies but almost none would go "Hmm, hard to get nvidia hardware today, lets dump all expertise and knowledge of CUDA et al we have and start using AMD hardware until we can get nvidia", everyone would just wait or rent in the meantime.
Inference workloads are usually a lot less picky about the exact hardware than model training. At least in the cases I know of the models are trained on Nvidia hardware, then exported and run on a mix of Nvidia and AMD
At scale for inference it's almost non-existent for a data center company to go for AMD because they couldn't get or afford Nvidia atm.
They instead start the build out and plug in stuff they can, then take a loan or ask Nvidia to help fund it. (I am not joking)
I believe the case is if you can prove to Nvidia you can install and provide more Nvidia capacity they help out because more Capacity going online today is in the best interest of Nvidia.
Spot prices of Nvidia GPUs going up is not good news for Nvidia btw. The people renting Nvidia has the least amount of friction in moving off Nvidia, especially with AI tools you could build and get up to speed with AMD stack much sooner...
So if Nvidia is truly not an option and you entire company is not a bet on Nvidia then you will move off but only as a renter not as a buyer unless they truly can't fund Nvidia I suppose.
But again I repeat if you build a datacenter and provide good enough base Nvidia will help fund you to a mostly complete data center.
People might not like it but that's the reason Nvidia is so unreasonably dominant even now when otherwise given the scale of investments it might have been cheaper to look for alternatives.
Too late, NK already completed all the markdown files needed to both create their hypernuke and recreate the hurricane machine Dick Cheney had left Obama.
Yes. They wrote an AI prompt to cut a tree and gave a presentation about how this is the future of tree cutting. They did not cut the tree, nor build a robot that cut the tree. They fantasised about building a robot that builds a robot that cuts the tree.
I love Groq, but across every single line break in your post there is a glaring issue that is easy to refute with in 15 seconds, even without 300t/s of throughput.
You wasted all of your commentary on snark and sadly unfunny humour, and yet still managed to add nothing.
Groq is more performant for the growing categories of inference-based tasks, wherein Nvidia's advantage in inference depends bulk/batch processing which will make up a smaller category over time, in relative terms.
The future of AI Silicon is inference, and the cost structure of AI data centres is constrained around the current necessity to have 'high GPU utilization' otherwise, the cost / amortization of the chips doesn't work out.
That cost structure is a limitation of Nvidia architecture.
Groq serves a lot faster, and without the limiting batching requirement, which opens hosting arrangements common in most classical hosting scenarios aka without necessarily the high utilization requirements.
Groq has bespoke hardware, lack of CUDA, much lower memory desnsity obviously and they don't have the deep distribution networks and leverage over TSMC that Nvidia has - but pound for pound, were we to be able to 'fire up a server' for our inference needs, it would be Groq, not Nvidia that we'd turn to.
Were they not a later market entrant and didn't have those barriers to entry, they'd be gigantic.
Yes, this! I am dying for need of zerotrust enterprise features and am about to have to actually talk to one of the enterprise sales folks, which will chew up a bunch of time and add stress I’d rather avoid.
Money is the most honest transaction, if people are paying money to anthropic it means its solving their pain. Its the same reason OpenAI and others are copying Anthropic.
This is some late-stage capitalist cope. Money goes to the person who can hoodwink people into thinking their product will do something they care about, not the person with the product that actually does something people want. There are a litany of examples of people swearing up and down by products that have been scientifically proven to __DO NOTHING__. The correlation between popularity and quality is tenuous AT BEST.
