Two pieces of recent technology industry news (2023-08) silenced all my thoughts because they were so mystical, not highly publicized, and yet real. The first is that the world’s leading graphical processing unit (GPU) maker Nvidia became the 5th company in the world to join the trillion dollars market value club. The second is that the chairperson of a world leading PC server maker Quanta Computer became the richest man in Taiwan due to a counter-intuitive rise of its share market price when things were not looking good everywhere. The writer has not invested a single dollar in the share market for the entire life but found these two developments had a lot to tell.
The two pieces of news are linked in a subtle manner. Nvidia makes GPU and was the first company to turn GPU to GPGPU which stands for general purpose GPU. GPGPU is therefore similar to central processing units (CPU) which are for general purpose applications. The main difference is that GPU is capable of doing general purpose applications in a massively parallel manner such as with 10,000 threads of simultaneous processing. This is so far so good.
Separately, AI turned up on the horizon with things like ChatGPT that are considered more intelligent and knowledgeable than an average human. The writer did a couple of language translations on Google recently and did see the power of AI. Google was able to return the translation to me faster than the time taken for my original piece to travel from my laptop to a nearby Google server. This was only a couple of days ago. The pleasant shock prompted me to associate the two pieces of industry news mentioned above with AI.
Large language models such as ChatGPT need a lot of GPU computation power. When AI develops or democratized, more GPU power is needed. Nvidia rides on this wave. Quanta makes PC servers and jumped onto the same bandwagon (this is a human imagination only).
The PC production industry was at its peak shortly around the millennium. Smart phones took over as the proud girl under the sun and dominated the technology world for nearly 20 years. The world predicted that electric vehicles and autonomous driving – PC servers on 4 wheels, will succeed smart phones in the limelight. The prediction is now subject to a twist. PC servers without wheels are coming back to the headlines beating those on wheels.
A silent evolution is going on in the background. The performance of ChatGPT and Google Translation is real and impressive. This is the good side. Equally, AI can produce fake or wrong information impressively too. AI is a technology. Like all other technologies, AI is neutral- it can do good or harm depending on human intention. We humans are here to exercise our superpower of differentiation, and at the same time shall stay good (for the peace, freedom, and prosperity of the world). AI is taking HI to test. Nevertheless, an opportunity has been identified here: PC is coming back to the limelight spot as propelled by the onset of AI. Compucon is a beneficiary of this phenomenon which contributed to the associations made in this article.
Acknowledgement: The image was copied from the website, the address of which is given on the image. That website has good discussions about HI v/s AI.
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Human Intelligence Competes with AI (W09)
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