![]() ![]() The cost of AI hardware, whether you buy it or rent it, is the dominant expense of AI startups the world over, and at this point somewhere around 80 percent to 85 percent of the money in these systems is going to Nvidia for GPUs, system boards, and networking. What was true of mainframes in the late 1980s and early 1990s – good heavens, is this stuff expensive – is true of GPU-accelerated systems, which are creating the gravity at the core of the AI galaxy. It gets jaggy, and sometimes, vendors are opportunistic and they charge a premium for capacity just because they can. And sometimes, customers buying expensive and vital systems just have to grin and bear it because there is not perfect elasticity of demand and supply that makes all those curves as smooth as they looked in the textbooks. And what we learned from this, among many things, is the concept that the price of a thing is what the market will bear. ![]() The laws of supply and demand rule our lives as much as the laws of electromagnetic radiation and gravity, and plotting out those pricing curves and seeing the effects of supply shortages and demand collapse, and the phenomenon of diminished marginal returns, was fascinating.īut when we started in the IT industry, the real illustration of supply and demand came from creating quarterly pricing guides for new and secondhand mainframe and minicomputer systems. Both microeconomics and macroeconomics stand out, as does poetry writing, philosophy, and religious studies despite the focus on engineering and American literature. It is funny what courses were the most fun and most useful when we look back at college. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |