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Comment by wegs | Hacker News Reader

shrug I'll bet my business on waiting an extra 15 minutes for analytics code to run.

Seriously. There's little most businesses really needs that I couldn't do on a nice 486 running at 33MHz. Now, if a $5000 workstations gives even 5% improvement to employee productivity, that's an obvious business decision. That doesn't mean it's necessary for a business to work. So dropping $1000 on an NVidia graphics card, if things ran faster and there were no additional cost, would be a no-brainer.

There are additional costs, though.

And no, you can't just go back from faster to slower. Try running Ubuntu 20.04 on the 486 -- it won't go. Over time, code fills up resources available. If I could take a 2x performance hit, it'd be fine. But GPUs are orders-of-magnitude faster.

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Please, show us how to train Alexa or BERT on a 486. That'll definitely win you the Turing and Gordon Bell prices, and probably the Peace Nobel price for all those power savings!

Please show me a business (aside from Amazon, obviously) who needs Alexa.

Most businesses need a word processor, a spreadsheet, and some kind of database for managing employees and inventory. A 486 does that just fine.

Most businesses derive additional value from having more, but that's always an ROI calculation. ROI has two pieces: return, and investment. Basic business analytics (regressions, hard-coded rules, and similar) have high return on low investment. Successively complex models typically have exponentially-growing complexity in return for diminishing returns. At some point, there's a breakpoint, but that breakpoint varies for each business.

If the goal is to limit GPGPU to businesses whose core value-add is ML (the ones building things like Alexa), NVidia has done an amazing job. If the goal is to have GPGPU as common as x86, NVidia has failed.

> Please show me a business (aside from Amazon, obviously) who needs Alexa.

I'll bite.

Have you ever been getting a haircut, and the hair dresser had to stop to pick up the phone to make an appointment?

Have you ever go to actually pick up a pizza at a small pizzeria and noticed that from 4 employees, 3 are making pizzas, and one is 99% of their time on the phone?

Every single business that you've ever used in your life would be better off with an Alexa that can handle the 99% most common user interactions.

In fact, even small pizzerias and hair salons nowadays are using third-party online booking systems with chat bots. Larger companies are able to turn a 200 people call center into a 20 man operation by just using an Alexa to at least identify customers and resolve the most common questions.

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