“Have you heard of Nvidia?” the wife asked me.
“Yeah. They make graphic cards used in your computer. Why do you ask?” I replied.
“There’s a headline here about their CEO warning about AIs being built.”
Ah. So that’s what this is all about. OK my Hordeling, this is going to get a little technical. First, a brief explanation about some of the hardware in your computer.
Your computer has a central processing unit (CPU). It runs on a clock that is much like a heart. It ‘beats’ multiple times a second. When the guy at the computer store says the computer has a gigahertz processor, it ‘beats’ a billion times a second. Each time the processor emits a pulse, it runs an instruction in the code running your computer. Running a billion instructions a second lets your computer do a lot of things.
Graphics these days are processing intensive. To help take the load off the CPU, your computer has a separate graphics processing unit (GPU). The only thing it does is all the calculations to display pictures on your screen. So those digital images of your last birthday party, that movie you watched on Blu-Ray, or those photorealistic graphics in your favorite massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMOPRPG) were processed by your GPU.
Now we turn our attention to a new AI model called Deep Seek. By now everyone is familiar with ChatGPT and the other AI applications that are stealing everyone’s content and will soon put everyone out of a job, as the naysayers would have us believe. Deep Seek was developed in China in 2023. That was about the time ChatGPT made a big splash on the scene. (ChatGPT got started around 2015.) Supposedly it was much cheaper to develop (something like one tenth of the cost of ChatGPT development). The engineering team is said to have come up with some significant innovations in how the AI operates, which has also lead to the rapid development of the system.
Deep Seek can be run over the web, like you do with ChatPGT or Gemini. It can also be downloaded to your local computer and run that way. It is an open source application. That means if you’ve got the coding skills you can use Deep Seek as the basis for your own AI projects. Need a chatbot for your website? A virtual assistant to handle common repetitive tasks you do all day? Build it yourself using Deep Seek!
Now, here’s where the bit about hardware I started off with and AI connect. AIs usually run on GPUs since they tend to be processing intensive, like graphics. Having a lot of GPUs to run your AI code can help you get an answer quicker. In the microsecond-long attention span culture we live in, speed is a valuable resource.
So, what does all this have to do with the CEO of Nvidia warning about AI development, you may ask? Just this, my Hordeling.
Deep Seek will work on older Nvidia hardware, so you don’t need the latest and greatest GPU to run the code. If you can run it on older hardware, then you don’t need to buy all of Nvidia’s new graphic cards. Trust me, there are TONS of older Nvidia cards around. It might take more effort to source them, but I’d imagine that is still probably cheaper than buying new graphic cards.
That’s the nature of technological innovation. It changes rapidly and you either keep up or get left behind. It will be interesting to see what develops over the next few years.
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