Not sure why a publicly accessible GPU cluster would be a better solution than the current system of research grants.
The investment was made to build the press, which created significant jobs and capital investment. The press, and others like it, were subsequently operated by and then sold to a private operator, which in turn enabled the massive expansion of both military manufacturing, and commercial aviation and other manufacturing.
The Heavy Press Program was a strategic investment that paid dividends by both advancing the state of the art in manufacturing at the time it was built, and improving manufacturing capacity.
A GPU cluster might not be the correct investment, but a strategic investment in increasing, for example, the availability of training data, or interoperability of tools, or ease of use for building, training, and distributing models would probably pay big dividends.
Of all the things to expand the scope of government spending why would they choose AI, or more specifically GPUs?
As for the why... because there's no shortage of capital for AI. It sounds like the government would like to encourage redirecting that capital to something that's good for the economy at large, rather than good for the investors of a handful of Silicon Valley firms interested only in their own short term gains.
If it succeeds, you were ahead of the curve. If it fails, you were prudent enough to fund an investigation early. Either way, bleeding edge tech gives you a W.
Would you mind expanding on these options? Universal training data sounds intriguing.
Much of this is already available to private sector entities, but having a publicly funded organization responsible for curating and publishing this would enable new entrants to quickly and easily get a foundation without having to scrape the internet again, especially given how rapidly model generated content is being published.
Totally agree. That doesn't mean it can't generate massive ROI.
> Govt investment would also drive the cost of GPUs up a great deal
Difficult to say this ex ante. On its own, yes. But it would displace some demand. And it could help boost chip production in the long run.
> Not sure why a publicly accessible GPU cluster would be a better solution than the current system of research grants
Those receiving the grants have to pay a private owner of the GPUs. That gatekeeping might be both problematic, if there is a conflict of interests, and inefficient. (Consider why the government runs its own supercomputers versus contracting everything to Oracle and IBM.)
This way the government pays 2'500 USD per card, not 40'000 USD or whatever absurd.
20-25 year old drugs are a lot more useful than 20-25 year old GPUs, and the manufacturing supply chain is not a bottleneck.
There's no generics for the latest and greatest drugs, and a fancy gene therapy might run a lot more than $40k.
You want to punish NVIDIA for calling its shots correctly? You don't see the many ways that backfires?
Along similar lines, I'm trying to build a developer credits program where I get whomever (AMD/Dell) to purchase credits on my super computers, that we then give away to developers to build solutions, which drives more demand for our hardware, and we commit to re-invest those credits back into more hardware. The idea is to create a win-win-win (us, them, you) developer flywheel ecosystem. It isn't a new idea at all, Nvidia and hyperscalers have been doing this for ages.
You mean a better solution than different teams paying AWS over and over, potentially spending 10x on rent rather than using all that cash as a down payment on actually owning hardware? I can't really speak for the total costs of depreciation/hardware maintenance but renting forever isn't usually a great alternative to buying.
