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S1: A $6 R1 competitor?

(timkellogg.me)
851 points tkellogg | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.453s | source
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swiftcoder ◴[] No.42948127[source]
> having 10,000 H100s just means that you can do 625 times more experiments than s1 did

I think the ball is very much in their court to demonstrate they actually are using their massive compute in such a productive fashion. My BigTech experience would tend to suggest that frugality went out the window the day the valuation took off, and they are in fact just burning compute for little gain, because why not...

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gessha ◴[] No.42948712[source]
This is pure speculation on my part but I think at some point a company's valuation became tied to how big their compute is so everybody jumped on the bandwagon.
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syntaxing ◴[] No.42948854[source]
Matt Levine tangentially talked about this during his podcast this past Friday (or was it the one before?). It was a good way to value these companies according to their compute size since those chips are very valuable. At a minimum, the chips are an asset that acts as a collateral.
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jxdxbx ◴[] No.42949098[source]
I hear this a lot, but what the hell. It's still computer chips. They depreciate. Short supply won't last forever. Hell, GPUs burn out. It seems like using ice sculptures as collateral, and then spring comes.
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sixothree ◴[] No.42949424[source]
Year over year gains in computing continue to slow. I think we keep forgetting that when talking about these things as assets. The thing controlling their value is the supply which is tightly controlled like diamonds.
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adrianN ◴[] No.42949510[source]
They have a fairly limited lifetime even if progress stands still.
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1. throwup238 ◴[] No.42950318[source]
Last I checked AWS 1-year reserve pricing for an 8x H100 box more than pays for the capital cost of the whole box, power, and NVIDIA enterprise license, with thousands left over for profit. On demand pricing is even worse. For cloud providers these things pay for themselves quickly and print cash afterwards. Even the bargain basement $2/GPU/hour pays it off in under two years.
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2. sdenton4 ◴[] No.42952661[source]
Labor! You need it to turn the bill of sale into a data center and keep it running. The bargain basement would be even cheaper otherwise...