Please for the love of god please cut out using teh term AI factory & AI Factories. It’s pure ‘buzzword bingo’.
They are AI accelerators within servers which in turn live in datacentres period.
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If i were you i would re-arrange my priorities. If you get triggered by something as simple as AI Factories or whatever. The internet is flooded with modern buzzwords. Absolutely FLOODED. Find something/somewhere else to channel your anger
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I am that man 
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I like to call them AI Slop factories thank you very much!
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Adding the slop just about makes the term bearable 
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AI SlopShops
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AI SlopShop… Now that’s a term I can get on board with.
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You should fight back against the marketing hype machine by adjusting vendor and product names then rewriting their acronyms.
Micro$lop
Ngreedia
Broadscum
CloudFail
Hewlett Crapard
dHell
Crisco
Jupiter
Fornicate
ClownStrike
whOracle
…
SAP = Surpassing All Profits / Start Adding People / Surprise After Purchase
ACI = Astoundingly Costly Idea
SRX = Staggering Revenue eXtraction
The practice is both therapeutic and effective at taking some control of the narrative back. ManagerZ apt to strike a deal over golf with ClownStrike without consulting their technical experts may think twice if they recall the catchy nickname floating around the office.
Row row, fight the power. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSnAdcyxCZ4
(This post is parody and protected speech under the 1st amendment.)
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It’s been a while since we’ve seen thingi — their last post was 1 year ago.
Welcome back, thanks for the feedback. 
“it really is jargon .. the real story here is the pattern .. ai factory sounds like marketing nonsense … with blackwell nvidia has a different aim .. this generation is where nvidia has laid a blueprint to standardize for the future” < quote from the video
I have deep concerns that when people see “AI” it is starting to == brain off/tune out when the point I was trying to make is that yes, there is a “marketing nonsense” aspect to it, but “ai factory” also means something different.
You define it as AI accelerators in your post. In the video and discussion I’m defining it as a wholistic stack which includes the software and networking and scaling strategies and heterogenous memory and …. Cuda isn’t the moat anymore. It’s the whole stack. And the stack is meant to be as standardized as a factory. It seems like a perfectly cromulent way to describe both the hardware and software side of the same coin especially if you can reasonably expect the hardware software “factory” stack to work the same or similarly with GB300 NVL72, B300, etc.
Congratulations on taking the engagement bait, I appreciate it.
If you’d rather shift the debate to something other than “ree the wrong words omg” I’m happy to engage there, too, but this is a silly thing to get hung up on and resurface in the community after a year (imho, ofc)
Edited To Add so more context
AI is only slop factories? I strongly disagree. Slop is so prevalent because, on average, we’re all not all that bright, we all like dopamine, and novelty amuses us. So of course but its a misrepresentation to say that all AI is toward slop. You could say we’re all dumb monkeys and can’t resist the temptation to push the dopamine button. I mean… the prime directive IS to dance.
top tier slop. and yet it still took a bit of human effort. (mmmm dopamine…)
Even setting aside the “look, look you can run it locally! and its useful!” videos we’ve done there is:
then more recently:
Do you think that AI is completely uninvolved in so many googlers winning nobel prizes? 3 in just the last couple of years, 6 in the last 5?
And to be clear these are not “talk to the LLM, get glazed” type stuff you may be familiar with.. this is tool creation/tool handling ‘advanced rubber ducking’ (to use a programming term) uses of these kinds of tools.
There is so, so much more opportunity for the open-minded. One does not need high end hardware at all to begin to build your own tooling to multiply your own productivity or understanding.
The Terry Tao stuff is even more interesting.. a 21 year old may have solved a fields medal type problem, emailed Tao and they got to chatting, and boom. It’s about agency and your will to not be a bump on a log and go out and do something.
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I get what you’re saying Wendal but what you’ve just said can be condensed into two one words… ‘AI Cluster’ no? Why invest in a whole new term when something suitable already exists and is a highly accurate descripion already?
To be honest the real issue I have with the term "AI Factory’ is that it implies that the hardware produces something tangible, unfortunately I’ve yet to see anything tangible when looking at the ROI of 95%+ of the Fortune 100 companies who’ve invested time and money into AI up to this point.
Maybe a more apt descripion would be ‘Emperor’s New Clothes Factories’?
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How does AI cluster describe the software stack? Nvidia is subsuming the AI factory term with their stack. AMD could have an AI cluster, too, as a generic term, could they not? In the same way AMD cannot have CUDA?
unfortunately I’ve yet to see anything tangible
Oh sure there is for sure a mirage aspect of it. It’s a bit like the gold rush though. There really is gold here, and a lot of it. And, for those with time and agency (imho) it is pretty easy to find gold, at least on a personal level, in that I have found some in terms of being able to execute on my ideas more quickly which has lead to my satisfaction and interesting projects.
Not everyone will find gold, and the bubble will pop if the ratio of gold to bubble is way, way off (and even with my enthusiasm I’d admit that I think it is – unless the GDP of the planet is about to 100x (also seems quite unlikely) ).
I see what you did there.
Methinks some alliteration is in order:
Slop shop
Edit: ah someone already beat me to it
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Worth repeating…
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Any Computing Cluster needs a software stack to work, you know that as well as I. We call it a Cluster regardless of the stack used; but all use a stack none the less.
Are we talking at crossed purposes, am I talking about describing Vacuum Cleaners whilst you’re talking about describing Nvidia’s Hoovers?
The gold rush analogy is a very good one, the people that made the most were spade sellers and only a tiny percentage of those actually digging saw any returns at all. The same will be true this time around.
What is scary is that 1000 of these racks = 150GW. China already open two new coal fired powere stations a week and their AI hardware requires vastly more energy than the West’s.
So the real question is this… Will AI accellerate Climate Change for the benefit of a few spade sellers whilst the majority of the human race suffer due to AI hardware devouring ever increasing amounts of energy whilst outputting ever increasing amounts of hot air (both figuratively and literally)? I say most likely.
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I can totally image the LinkedIn types coming up with this and similar titles. I hate buzzwords. I hate stacking buzzwords.
Having said that it seems like the name of a product no? In any case I’m down with calling it slopshop just to put more nails on the stupid billionaire hype and whatever mr ceo manager thinks they don’t need engineers anymore.
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Literally, at the end of the video, I said that I had come to understand “AI Factory” was an nvidia term and what they intend to be their new moat/stack. Everyone hyper-focusing on the terminology is going to let nvidia do that, too. It’s the new CUDA. Because with Vera Rubin you’ll be able to migrate the whole stack.
I disagree about the software aspect to an extent because job loading/mangement, check pointing and scatter-gather have become as important as the actual compute stack and AI cluster doesn’t necessarily include all those features. Nvidia is saying that with their AI factory you get all this stuff. And that it will be forward compatible. Even CUDA Kernels > CUDA which is not at all the same IMHO except possibly where it fits in the stack.
I am not worried about the coal factories or climate change. What’ll probably happen is that China will leapfrog the west with Actually More Advanced Technologies like China’s ‘artificial sun’ reactor shatters major fusion limit — a step closer to near-limitless clean energy
or possibly the stellerator
China Takes the Lead in Fusion Energy | Neutron Bytes
… and 30 reactors under construction
China’s Nuclear Power Program: A Blueprint for Global Competitiveness
at that scale two measly coal reactors would seem to be a stop-gap right? And if they do hit the moonshot of fusion or stable thorium reaction what then? keep burning coal? no chance.
- The latest EAST campaigns are being interpreted as a direct validation of this idea, with researchers pointing to the way impurity levels and temperature profiles matched the Proposed French model’s predictions.*
Unlikely – the cost of energy will crash hard should one of these moonshot breakthroughs occur. Germany has some promising research on this too, maybe we’ll get lucky there.
I do agree we’ll hit a wall if how the technology is approached. But this to me is like Edison worrying about long transmission of Direct Current. Oh we’ll have so much energy loss transmitting electricity! AC was always there but there will be an AI breakthrough that reduces the burden of these aspects. The trough of disillusionment | by Tom McCallum | Medium
Once the bubble pops, there will be useful detritus left behind – and I think what’s left behind will be more useful to the rank-and-file than the wealthy elite.
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The energy debate is not well though because it assumes energy is easy to transport in a lossless way. A power plant generates a X number of power regardless if its using or not. That energy cannot be stored and powering up or down huge power plants are not trivial.
If done right datacenters (and hash mining operations) can subsidize energy. It can also create incentives to deploy more solar or wind where there is no commercial interest to do so since computational is not much geologically bound.
I’m normally suspicious of people coming with this argument since most advocate for population reduction (as in: starve poor people to death because they can’t afford food).
one of the reason why i belive that AI is more towards slop is coz theres more dumb ppl that smart ppl , i mean a good majority of ppl i see online building a pc is for gaming , very few for actual work and stuff , not complaing abt it , just an observation that gen-pop is dumb and by the time the nerds come up with something actually useful , the world will be a hell hole by then , unless Tech bros find a way to market hell hole and 10x the shareholder value of it .
AI is a tool for smart ppl and a slop machine for dummies , and lets be honest a good majority of the population fall into the latter category