In the AI industry, especiallyGenerative AIThe rapid development of technology and the broad prospects of application have attracted a lot of investment and attention in the field. However, the high cost of this field has also caused widespread discussion in the industry. Recently, a report in the Wall Street Journal pointed out that companies in the AI industry are purchasingNvidiaGPUThe investment in the industry is 17 times its revenue, which is a shocking figure and has also triggered in-depth thinking about the future development of the industry.
AI StartupsCognition Labs, backed by renowned investor Peter Thiel, is seeking a $2 billion valuation, a nearly sixfold increase in valuation in a few weeks. Cognition Labs’ team is made up of gold medalists from the International Olympiad in Informatics, and their AI code tool Devin is known as “FirstCognition Labs is a company that has created a “near-human AI programmer” that can complete complex coding tasks autonomously. Despite the promising product, the company has not yet generated meaningful revenue, reflecting a common phenomenon in the AI industry: the contradiction between high valuations and lack of revenue.
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The explosion of generative AI technology has proven the importance of computing power, but as the number of parameters in large models increases, the sustainability of the approach of increasing scale to improve intelligence becomes a question. Currently, large models are already very expensive, and as technology develops, the rate at which these models “depreciate” is also accelerating. In addition, manyLarge Language Models(LLM) requires additional processing layers to solve the problem of generating content, which further increases the computational cost.
For large Internet companies and startups, running large generative models requires large data centers, and Nvidia is the main supplier in this market. Despite the growing demand for GPUs, not all companies have the ability to invest tens of billions of dollars to remain competitive. In addition, the depreciation of GPU expenditures may also become part of the company's financial planning.
Despite all the challenges and doubts, the AI industry is highly competitive and has become an industryLeadersThe potential benefits could be huge. However, the specific shape and size of these benefits are still difficult to predict. In this process, Nvidia seems to have become an unexpected winner, because no matter what the outcome of the competition in the AI industry, the demand for high-performance computing hardware is growing.
In general, the rapid development of the AI industry has brought huge opportunities, but it is also accompanied by high costs and uncertainties. How to achieve a sustainable business model while pursuing technological progress is an important issue that all AI companies need to face.