Tesla has a path to economies of scale: they already announced that if Dojo works as expected they'll make it available to others as an AWS-style service.
Which is brilliant: they might end up making money on this.
AI is clearly here to stay. The demand for AI training will clearly explode in the future.
Running training in-house is not easy or cheap. You don't just plug in 1000 NVIDIA GPUs. You need massive up-front payment for GPUs and you're basically running your own extremely energy hungry datacenter .
Tesla might built and operate massive datacenters. They'll use as much as they need for internal needs and sell the remaining capacity to others.
This might take 5 years but the path to do it is clear.
I don’t see how they’re going to commercialise this as a cloud compute service.
For one, they’ve built a chip that operates in a fundamentally different way to other chips. So any other company that wanted to use it would have to invest a considerable amount of resources in building up the institutional knowledge to use it effectively.
Additionally, the lack of virtual memory and multi-tasking support renders it pretty much impossible to divide up compute between multiple customers. So, commercialising this would require customers renting out the whole unit, which is contrary to how cloud computing usually works.
Are there companies out there that have the capital and use cases necessary to fit into Dojo Cloud? Maybe, though not one I’ve worked for. Would they trust the stable genius currently heading up Tesla enough to make such an investment? Perhaps, but I wouldn’t, but what do I know?
I assume you never actually built any cloud infrastructure yourself. Plus Tesla (aka) Elon, well, say a lot of stuff, not always necessarily correct.
Internal research product is super far from any actual production usage. Especially if you go against some established paradigms, that require enormous amount of effort (more than developing silicon) to build tolling around, so people can design, program, debug, monitor it.
But that’s internal usage. Cloud is a totally different ballgame. You have to deal with thousands more requirements (and you cannot generally tell customer to do something else instead, as you can with internal teams). And customers that have operating procedures totally different from yours, 0 access to your internal knowledge and infinite less tolerance for BS answers (as you are paying customer, not a someone on the same boat).
Building cloud is extremely hard, and there’s a reason why Google is still losing money on it.
Plus, let’s even say that your 5 year estimate is correct, Dojo is amazing and the future of tech and they may have viable product by then. Do you think that Nvidia wont advance their AI offering by then? Google TPU will stop being developed? Or will Tesla continue investing to churn new generation of Dojo every year?
> Tesla has a path to economies of scale: they already announced that if Dojo works as expected they'll make it available to others as an AWS-style service.
"If we manage to put together a working processor, supporting hardware, OS, and possibly ad-hoc programming language, our next step is to also develop a bunch of web services to provide cloud hosting services."
Not very credible. As if the key to offer competing cloud hosting services is developing the whole hardware and software stack.
You say that Tesla might do this for others, AWS style.
Then talk about the upfront in house costs of setting up for GPU ops. But ignore that if an AWS style model works for you, well, AWS is already capable of giving it to you in GPUs.
They aren't going after economies. If you look closely at their design choices, they are building a pure scale-out vector machine unlike anything else currently on the market. I'm guessing they expect it to be head & shoulders ahead for their inhouse workload.
kjksf|3 years ago
Which is brilliant: they might end up making money on this.
AI is clearly here to stay. The demand for AI training will clearly explode in the future.
Running training in-house is not easy or cheap. You don't just plug in 1000 NVIDIA GPUs. You need massive up-front payment for GPUs and you're basically running your own extremely energy hungry datacenter .
Tesla might built and operate massive datacenters. They'll use as much as they need for internal needs and sell the remaining capacity to others.
This might take 5 years but the path to do it is clear.
scoopertrooper|3 years ago
For one, they’ve built a chip that operates in a fundamentally different way to other chips. So any other company that wanted to use it would have to invest a considerable amount of resources in building up the institutional knowledge to use it effectively.
Additionally, the lack of virtual memory and multi-tasking support renders it pretty much impossible to divide up compute between multiple customers. So, commercialising this would require customers renting out the whole unit, which is contrary to how cloud computing usually works.
Are there companies out there that have the capital and use cases necessary to fit into Dojo Cloud? Maybe, though not one I’ve worked for. Would they trust the stable genius currently heading up Tesla enough to make such an investment? Perhaps, but I wouldn’t, but what do I know?
justapassenger|3 years ago
Internal research product is super far from any actual production usage. Especially if you go against some established paradigms, that require enormous amount of effort (more than developing silicon) to build tolling around, so people can design, program, debug, monitor it.
But that’s internal usage. Cloud is a totally different ballgame. You have to deal with thousands more requirements (and you cannot generally tell customer to do something else instead, as you can with internal teams). And customers that have operating procedures totally different from yours, 0 access to your internal knowledge and infinite less tolerance for BS answers (as you are paying customer, not a someone on the same boat).
Building cloud is extremely hard, and there’s a reason why Google is still losing money on it.
Plus, let’s even say that your 5 year estimate is correct, Dojo is amazing and the future of tech and they may have viable product by then. Do you think that Nvidia wont advance their AI offering by then? Google TPU will stop being developed? Or will Tesla continue investing to churn new generation of Dojo every year?
arinlen|3 years ago
"If we manage to put together a working processor, supporting hardware, OS, and possibly ad-hoc programming language, our next step is to also develop a bunch of web services to provide cloud hosting services."
Not very credible. As if the key to offer competing cloud hosting services is developing the whole hardware and software stack.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
FireBeyond|3 years ago
Then talk about the upfront in house costs of setting up for GPU ops. But ignore that if an AWS style model works for you, well, AWS is already capable of giving it to you in GPUs.
ip26|3 years ago
rbanffy|3 years ago