Ben Blaine @benblainex

3d ago

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Two of the most powerful people in chips sat on a stage this week and said, more or less, that AI is underwater. Hock Tan of Broadcom put the numbers on it. The world now spends roughly $200B a year generating tokens, and those tokens bring in roughly $150B of value. Most companies, he said, can't find any return at all. They're spending tokens the way a kid spends arcade money, and they're learning about as much. I don't think that's a model problem. The models are extraordinary. It's a cost problem, and underneath the cost problem is a power problem. Lip-Bu Tan of Intel said it plainly. GPUs are power hungry, which is why AI needs so much energy. He also said the next frontier is neuromorphic: designs that work more like a brain and don't need anywhere near as much power. Then Hock added the part I keep thinking about. A standard GPU is one size fits all, and one size fits all isn't the most efficient. Hardware built for one workload can beat a general GPU while drawing a fracti…