Amazon built a massive AI supercluster for Anthropic called Project Rainier – here's what we know so far Amazon Web Services (AWS) is in the process of building out a massive supercomputing cluster containing "hundreds of thousands" of accelerators that promises to give its model building buddies at Anthropic a leg up in the AI arms race. The system, dubbed Project Rainier, is set to come online later this year with compute …
Can it help Alexa* understand clearly spoken words or Amazon Music remember about an album that is in my library and is a popular play ??
“I don’t know about that” or “I can’t find that” or playing something with no even tenuous association to the words I have just spoken at my Echo …..
Project Darien Scheme, not Rainer.
* Siri is little better.
Project Rainier is not a marvel of engineering - it’s a monument to corporate parasitism. A 2.2-gigawatt grinder designed to pulp decades of human creativity, labour, and culture into something marketable - without recognition, consent, or compensation.
The entire AI gold rush is built on a one-way pipeline - human knowledge in, shareholder profit out. It's not innovation, it’s enclosure. The commons fed the machine, now the machine sells it back behind a paywall.
Amazon isn’t solving problems - it’s scaling extraction. The reward for your lifetime of learning, writing, coding, and creating? Watching your contributions weaponised to replace you, then licensed to you at a monthly fee.
But hey - it’s air cooled.
And next time you're ten hours deep in A&E, trying to distract yourself with a chatbot, remember who didn't pay tax.
"...and next time you're ten hours deep in A&E, trying to distract yourself with a chatbot"
Not to be pedantic but, is ChatGPT likely to replace my wife, family and friends?
If all I have while I'm in A&E is ChatGPT, I've got bigger problems than AI taking over the world.
The competition underway to build the biggest and most energy consuming datacenters, to train and infer relatively dubious AI into matching the predictions of even more dubious scaling laws, is quite worrisome imho ... But Trainium2, there might be something interesting going on inside that chip ... something that the TNP (linked in inset) notes "is not clear from the documentation" ... that thing about the GPSIMD-Engine.
So the chip has on-chip RAM (boring), and a scalar engine (boring), and a vector engine (yawn), and a tensor engine (snore), and a GP-SIMD unit (WoWee!!!). Nobody knows what it is but if it follows from this Technion paper: "GP-SIMD Processing-in-Memory" then it's a bloody 1-bit PiM machine!
That's right, you got a whole bunch of 1-bit processing units (ALUs) hanging off of the RAM, ready to process its data in parallel, making the "GP-SIMD processor [...] a large memory with massively parallel processing capability" ... much like the June 1993 Top500-leading Connection Machine, but on a single chip!
And since we've known for 2 weeks now that 1-bit processing by a one instruction set computer (OISC) is just fine (eg. AC comment there about "reverse subtract and skip if borrow") then ¡BANG! that engine of the Trainium2 becomes a highly flexible parallel processor that can deal with data of arbitrary widths, right in RAM!
Very clever indeed (if it works!)!
Even for the left pondial reader that's easier to grasp as 4.6 acres; for the more enlightened, 1.86 hectares.
Thirty of the blighters converting 2.2 GW into heat. I think about ~4 kW/m2 ~0.4 J/cm2 every second which is roughly four times the maximum solar energy ~1 kW/m2 (Sun directly overhead.) So rooftop solar PVs aren't going to power this waste of real estate.
I assume "Rainier" isn't a nod to the Grimaldi so I guess it's named after Mt Rainier (the delightful Rainier Cherry† was apparently named after the mountain.)
† unfortunately only sporadically imported into AU from the US.
This is another energy hog of "Because we can, not because we should", or for any actual necessity.
Sure it looks impressive, but why?
Some people have entirely too much money. There are better ways to use multimillionaire's excess money. Like fair share taxation, used for working economies and proper functioning governments for its citizens. Heaven on earth.
how'd that brexit thing work out?
Go on rub it in. It could've worked out if allowed to. The problem was no electable political party wants it to. I predict even Reform will give it up if they get elected. Farrage and friends value power more than integrity. The EU is a corrupt gang of bureaucrats and self appointed elites. To step back from that and to engage with the developing world and tiger economies fully made sense to me.
> but how'd that brexit thing work out?
Unlike the AC I'll openly answer that - badly, the biggest mistake we ever made but hey that is what a tiny majority (2%) of the country voted for so we are stuck with it And despite whatever arguments you want to make the extremists of either camp are so deeply entrenched in their beliefs that nothing will budge them and the country remains deeply divided by it.
For the record I voted remain.
And if a tiny majority voted to remain, you'd support another vote or wouldn't mind Brexiteers undermining the majority vote? You may not have noticed that many elections swing on similar majorities, do you consider them all moot including the ones that went your way? I also don't think Brexit has been proven bad despite the fact that the opportunity has been undermined. Looking at Europe it doesn't look as if we have declined in relative terms over the period. In fact I don't understand why we have an (illegal) immigration problem if it's so terrible here when they have already reached the EU utopian dream of France.
>Most of us tried to do the right thing, but you try to reasoning with idiots sometime. Not to rub it in, but how'd that brexit thing work out?
(Original AC)
Once upon a time in this country, the moral conviction was such that families volunteered to arm themselves (many who brought lever action rifles superior to the common infantry musket in firepower, accuracy and capacity) and moved to Kansas to do battle with their own neighbors to *make sure* Kansas became a free state, county by county, town by town.
Now our "radicals" wave a few picket signs about brunch and cheer as riot police (collecting taxpayer-paid overtime for their presence) give them the thumbs up, hoping to, quietly and orderly-like, like, do change and hope, or something, maaaan.
Oh and if those cops could like. Take away the guns from the MAGAs (their range buddies) that'd be rizz too.
I apologize if that's harsh to admit, but I'm not particularly proud of my nation at this point in history. We are fucking failing *big time* at living up to the better parts of America.
Can't we do something to recover heat loss? The whole AI thing makes the (UK) government's bleatings about NetZero completely illogical. Not only will it use tremendous amounts of energy to build and run but we then waste most of it. Maybe as biology is efficient and innovative but slow would could link millions of our brains together ... Elon? What could possible go wrong with that ... Trump, Starmer, Putin, Xi would never abuse it.
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