One point of possible critics of this article is that it assumes that the “price of flops” is independent variable from the “amount of investment”. However, there are two ways how demand affects the price of calculations:
1) Economy of scale. Mass manufacturing of some type of hardware for AI will dilute the cost of its development. I heard that an order of magnitude increase of scale results—in general—in 2 times price decrease per unit. If a company produce hardware for itself, like Google, it also skips marketing costs.
2) Rise of AI specialised hardware, like TPU and Graphcore IPU.
One point of possible critics of this article is that it assumes that the “price of flops” is independent variable from the “amount of investment”. However, there are two ways how demand affects the price of calculations:
1) Economy of scale. Mass manufacturing of some type of hardware for AI will dilute the cost of its development. I heard that an order of magnitude increase of scale results—in general—in 2 times price decrease per unit. If a company produce hardware for itself, like Google, it also skips marketing costs.
2) Rise of AI specialised hardware, like TPU and Graphcore IPU.