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S1: A $6 R1 competitor?

(timkellogg.me)
851 points tkellogg | 7 comments | 05 Feb 25 11:05 UTC | HN request time: 1.487s | source | bottom
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swiftcoder ◴[05 Feb 25 13:25 UTC] 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 ◴[05 Feb 25 14:13 UTC] 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 ◴[05 Feb 25 14:24 UTC] 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 ◴[05 Feb 25 14:42 UTC] 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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baxtr ◴[05 Feb 25 14:52 UTC] No.42949241[source]▶
If so wouldn’t it be the first time in history when more processing power is not used?

In my experience CPU/GPU power is used up as much as possible. Increased efficiency just leads to more demand.

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1. littlestymaar ◴[05 Feb 25 17:16 UTC] No.42951798[source]▶
I think you're missing the point: H100 isn't going to remain useful for a long time, would you consider Tesla or Pascal graphic cards a collateral? That's what those H100 will look like in just a few years.
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2. ijidak ◴[05 Feb 25 18:13 UTC] No.42952713[source]▶
Yeah, exactly! I've got some 286, 386, and 486 CPUs that I want to claim as collateral!
3. baxtr ◴[05 Feb 25 18:51 UTC] No.42953289[source]▶
Not sure I do tbh.

Any asset depreciates over time. But they usually get replaced.

My 286 was replaced by a faster 386 and that by an even faster 468.

I’m sure you see a naming pattern there.

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4. kgwgk ◴[05 Feb 25 19:26 UTC] No.42953767[source]▶
> Any asset depreciates over time.

That's why "those chips are very valuable" is not necessarily a good way to value companies - and it isn't if they can extract the value from the chips before they become worthless.

> But they usually get replaced.

They usually produce enough income to cover depreciation so you actually have the cash to replace them.

5. littlestymaar ◴[05 Feb 25 21:19 UTC] No.42955307[source]▶
And that's why such assets represents only a marginal part of valuation. (And if you look at accounting, this depreciation is usually done over three years for IT hardware, and as such most of these chips have already lost half of their accounting value in the balance sheet).
6. baq ◴[05 Feb 25 21:36 UTC] No.42955541[source]▶
My 1070 was replaced by… nothing, I moved it from a haswell box to an alder lake box.

Given that inference time will soon be extremely valuable with agents and <thinking> models, H100s may yet be worth something in a couple years.

7. mvc ◴[06 Feb 25 14:49 UTC] No.42962882[source]▶
> My 286 was replaced by a faster 386 and that by an even faster 468.

How much was your 286 chip worth when you bought your 486?