The Danger of Giving Nvidia AI Chips to Fascists
OpenAI — which is an a16z company, one of hundreds which it controls — has a big fucking problem… and it is problem that is shared across all a16z companies: they need AI supercomputing infrastructure in order to support all of its platforms and applications and actually compete in the AI market.
They are certainly succeeding in the market-ing but they have a much more existential issue, that of competing for increasingly scarce and expensive AI chips need to powered applications like ChatGPT or Co-Pilot, a16z’s coding automation software. There is currently a global race to attain these fundamental units, as recent articles highlight the efforts of Saudi Arabia and the UAE to compete in this area:
“Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are buying up thousands of the high-performance Nvidia chips crucial for building artificial intelligence software, joining a global AI arms race that is squeezing the supply of Silicon Valley’s hottest commodity…
According to people familiar with the moves, Saudi Arabia has bought at least 3,000 of Nvidia’s H100 chips — a $40,000 processor described by Nvidia chief Jensen Huang as “the world’s first computer [chip] designed for generative AI” — via the public research institution King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (Kaust)…
… leading Chinese tech groups such as Tencent and Alibaba are seeking to buy up Nvidia’s high-performance chips. The most advanced LLMs are owned by US companies including Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google. These groups are also the primary buyers of Nvidia’s H100 and A100 chips. According to multiple sources close to Nvidia and its manufacturer, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the chipmaker will ship about 550,000 of its latest H100 chips globally in 2023, primarily to US tech companies….
In Saudi Arabia, Kaust will receive 3,000 of these specialist chips, worth about $120mn in total, by the end of 2023, according to two people close to the university’s AI labs. By comparison, estimates suggest OpenAI trained its advanced GPT-3 model on 1,024 A100 chips — the predecessor to Nvidia’s latest chips — in just over a month.”
Another source states “ChatGPT, for instance, reportedly required more than 10,000 GPUs to train, and demands even more resources to continually operate.”
And OpenAI is experiencing a compute shortage as we speak, resulting in curtailed access and performance problems, held in a deal to Microsoft, which is planning to build its own chips but in my opinion has almost no chance of being competitive, and of the giants I think Microsoft is the least likely to survive in any vibrant way. Both Microsoft and OpenAI are beholden to Nvidia as is the rest of the world and the other giants too. A16z’s focus on mass consumer experiences, like OpenAI, unites with Nvidia’s need to have mass adoption and traffic on its systems, and indeed, this is the cusp of the relationship between the infrastructure giants and the VCs and their tech startups.
I try to strike a balance in this blog between the technical accuracy that makes sense to engineers and something more understandable for my less technical audience — this ensures no one is happy — but for our non-technical readers, the main thing to understand here is that the entire new world of computing relies on extremely expensive and scarce chips for which there are only a few providers in the world; and Nvidia has no peer, and the problems they address are truly the hardest problems in computing science — OpenAI is just a slice on top of it, and its likely that most of the work for ChatGPT was just done by Nvidia engineers lol.
A16z is not a compute company, that is not where its strengths and competencies lie, it cannot provide this to itself; which at this stage in the game literally requires a giant, and this is very much different technical problems, people problems, talents, skills, etc than are reflected in the VC portfolio. Without access to the infrastructure that is built by Nvidia — which is really the only game in town for AI supercomputing right now (and Oracle is going to play a huge role here as well) — they are fucked. But if they continue to enjoy a privileged relationship with Nvidia and if Nvidia continues to provide them with supercomputing, engineers and researchers, marketing and partnerships, the fascist venture capital element will be even more powerful than we can imagine, riding and leeching off the actual innovation and innovators in the field to pursue its war hawk, colonial agenda, including a mass simultaneous invasion in Kenya, Nigeria, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and others; and the building of dozens of weapons startups, who are already using AI for AI-piloted weapons delivery, AI-powered drone swarms, AI intelligence crunching, and so on, via a16z companies Skydio, Toka, SkyShield, ShieldAI, Hadrian, Palantir (which has been in the AI game a long time), and most importantly, Anduril, founded to be and rapidly growing into a massive weapons manufacturer and promising to become one of the largest, with the goal of a sea-change in military development replacing the top weapons manufacturers, and is also a major user of AI technologies.
A16z’s weapons program and its establishment of “sovereign zones” in countries across the global south in order to escape having to answer to anyone, relies in a very serious and fundamental way on Nvidia chips; with only a few players on the stage as viable providers, these giants are in a position to give privileged access to infrastructure, and to deny it as well. Nvidia is the new king-maker, and has re-introduced scarcity to compute in a way that Amazon was never designed for; this will propel the stock, among other things, to new heights, and it also has proven that Larry Ellison’s model of public/private cloud and expensive, tightly coupled machines, is in fact the computing paradigm needed to meet this moment.
In our model of the world, Nvidia is a capitalist industrialist company; it should not be thought of any differently than historical capitalist industrialist companies like car manufactures, oil producers and so on; and we must look to the collaboration of capitalist industry with the rise of fascism, so that we can understand what we are potentially looking at here.
A number of American industrialists provided key technology, weapons, vehicles and infrastructure to the Nazi regime. Ford was a massive culprit, but Standard Oil, Dow Chemical, IBM and others, also supplied the Nazis.
The US ambassador to Germany at the time, William E. Dodd, stated in 1937: “A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime.... Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extend aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there.”
There is a long history here of capitalist industrialists in the US, providing material aid to fascism, providing weapons, providing technology, providing raw materials, giving access to instruments of production. And please keep in mind that while venture capital is thought of as American, venture capital certainly does not see itself as American, but rather, its own fascist sovereign and it is executing at furious pace to establish its own power bases outside of the US control, from which it will operate as a distributed sovereign nation. This agenda is in no way a secret, and specific plans for it were published by a16z in the book Network State last year, as they continue to execute on every element of this plan; this is not a conspiracy theory, but a description of what they have said they are doing, what they are materially doing, what they have done in the past, and where we can draw a clear material trajectory. It is from there, outside the sovereign of the US, that it plans to rise. And Nvidia is vital to its plans.
A16z is fascist. There is no longer any way to deny it and Marc Andreessen has said repeatedly, in public, that things can only go two ways, fascism and communism, and we can’t have communism. So read between the fucking lines.
A16z and its crony firms believe in innate superiority and race science; they believe in unregulated medical testing and have already conducted unregulated vaccine trials in the Carribean, with many more in the works; they are virulent misogynists and racists, they believe in dictatorship; they believe that the innately weak are holding back technological progress; they believe that the innately weak are stopping the naturally superior from ascension. I’ve documented extensively in this blog, and particularly in a 2-part series on analyzing tech as fascism, (Part one and part two), in which we do a detailed and substantive analysis. There is no more room for pretending not to know about this rogue fascist strain of venture capital, or to downplay its ambitions.
For tech fascists eying global domination and exploitation, they are reliant on American computing industrialists, and these industrialists are already handing over huge amounts of compute power, that these fascists have no other way of obtaining, laying the stage for the rise of technofascism.
I hope that Nvidia will do the right thing and cut off the a16z conspiracy from compute power; but as they likely will not, this is the historical documentation that they were warned. Jensen Huang, on this day, you were told. As for Ellison… he already knows. And I strongly hope that he in particular will make the right move and focus on helping the Mayo Clinic cure cancer, not letting these fucking fascists drag poor people into unregulated medical testing sites all over the global south for fucking pennies while their families starve. That is not how we do medicine Larry, so be serious about the company you keep and it won’t come back to haunt your legacy.
This is on both your souls. You will be remembered for how you provided material aid for the rogue fascist venture capitalist conspiracy in these days, more than any of you or your team’s technical achievements, if you don’t stop now. I will make sure it goes down on the record, now and as it unfolds, and I will land the anti-fascist movement, and the medical ethics problems, that will inevitably rise, at your door. You don’t need a16z. Let them go.