Oh cool, Alibaba's first home-grown AI chip. Oh wait, it's only for its own cloud servers... for now Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce conglomerate, revealed its first cloud AI accelerator chip on stage at its Aspara Conference held in Hangzhou, China, on Wednesday. Known as Hanguang 800, it’s the first time the company has launched its own silicon, but the chip is not yet in production. Alibaba has no plans to sell the …
I'd like to blame this on Trump but I think it is more to do with the failure of globalization. We can't outsource our manufacturing to other countries. Lower cost is great. Loss of jobs and control is not. Kudos to the Chinese though. They've grown a great high tech sector and economy on the backs of the greedy Corporations that pushed for globalization and all the outsourcing that followed.
Alibaba are following Google and AWS's lead with similar motivation - this would have happened with or without Trump being present.
The big cloud providers needs aren't necessarily met by off the shelf hardware, so they design what they need. They all believe (probably correctly) that AI will be hugely important in the future and these types of systems will collect data and provide initial processing before feeding it to centralised systems.
I think it might be a bit early to capitulate on this one. Globalization is not a 2 hour match, and the rabble rousing of a few drunken hooligans is far from a victory.
From a historical perspective, 90 years ago, Democracy was widely considered to be on the ropes. WWI represented a failure of egalitarian rule to avoid the violent excesses of the traditional monarchies; fascism was on the rise, and democracies were tumbling.
Fast forward 30 years, fascism is almost eliminated, and all of the best ideas of communism have been incorporated into liberal democracies. Even Richard Nixon, the nasty little side kicker in the McCarthy hearings declares "I am a Keynesian now". Nobody talks of returning to fascism, and the Monarchy are well entrenched as a sort of live punch and judy show for the amusement of those that were once their subjects.
Another 30 years sees the widespread collapse of communism and totalitarian governments everywhere. Not without its problems; but nothing worthwhile is. Globalization rises, as a movement to better co-ordinate efforts of people around the world is the best medicine for childish diseases like nationalism and war.
A final 30 years, and Globalization is in about the same place Democracy was 90 years ago. It has had many successes, but some of its failures have blindsided people. But anybody who thinks that the world is on the verge of retreating 60, 100, 1000 or 3000 years as various extremist groups from Northern England, Central USA, or the Middle East believe really needs a cold shower.
It is a laughable concept that a society that couldn't deal with the new reality it met in its day could have much to offer with the even newer reality of today.
This is a signal that every country needs to be in the chip race. Any country that's not will be owned by one of the "chip powers". Take your pick which one!
It's already happening in defence, this will be a hell of a lot relevant to economies and have widespread and fundamental effects down to an individual level.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
