402: Nvidia GTC 2023, Constellation Software AGM, Apple AI Catch up, Senra & Munger, ChatGPT Helps Hackers, and The Offer

"Sometimes, being confused is the rational reaction to a situation"

John Lennon was always looking for the impossible, the unattainable. He was never satisfied.

He once said to me years later, "You know, George, I’ve never really liked anything we’ve ever done." I said, "Really John? But you made some fantastic records!" He said, "Well, if I could do them all over again I would." —George Martin

🚢⚓️ The steamboat crew passed 16,000 earlier this week… That’s 1.33 Hobarts!

There’s something I haven’t mentioned yet but it’s worth highlighting: If you have a Substack and you’re recommending my Substack on yours, I want to thank you very much, because a lot of the steamboat crew has been coming through these personal recs, and it has truly made a huge difference.

The world is so vast and discovery is one of the biggest challenges in an era of abundance, so when you go “pssst, look over there! 👉” and tell a friend to have a look at my grab bag of stupid dad jokes and Japanese kitchen knife reviews, it’s likely helping someone find me that would not have found me any other way.

For that, I bow very low and thank you very much 💚 🥃

🤔🤷‍♀️🕵️‍♀️ Sometimes, being confused is the rational reaction to a situation.

For example, when you learn something that goes against your model of reality.

What’s important is to notice when we are confused so that we can find answers and move toward being non-confused.

There is so much ‘silent confusion’ out in the world.

Something doesn’t make sense, but people just kind of shrug it off and move on. Over time, confusion becomes such a normal state for these people that they don’t even notice it anymore — and may not realize that others aren’t as confused about things as they are.

The next time something doesn’t quite make sense to you, take a moment to figure out why. 🕵️‍♀️

🐁 ⌨️🖥️🖱️🤫 Lately, I have been recording more podcasts and doing more video calls.

I was faced with a stupid problem: My mouse made a lot of noise with each click ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It may have been my own fault for getting a random cheapo $15 Belkin mouse in the first place… But anyway, I was listening to the latest episode of the Cortex podcast and one of the hosts mentioned getting a ‘Logitech MX Master 3S’ — with the “S” standing for “silent”.

Ooh! That sounded just like what I needed, so I ordered one.

It looks like a weird spaceship, but it feels pretty comfortable and ergonomic. Maybe a bit heavier than I’m used to… I’ll wait to have used it for a while to do a real review, but so far I really like it, and it’s really quiet! 👂🏻

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🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴

🔥 Nvidia GTC 2023 Highlights 🤖

The Green Company held its GTC developer conference, and many exciting things were unveiled.

As an aside: am I the only one who looks *very* closely at Jensen every time he’s on camera now because I’m never sure when they’re going to try to trick us with a virtual Jensen again..?

The zeitgeist feels a bit like Jensen has been telling us about AI for years and most of us kinda nodded along but we didn’t *really* get it, but now the rest of the world has finally caught up to him.

On to my highlights:

I think it’s telling that the first announcements they made were for software libraries designed specifically for various industries to accelerate their computing. Nvidia seems to want to both be quite horizontal and general and also offer vertical markets custom software and sometimes hardware (robotics, self-driving cars, etc).

It’s an ambitious strategy to try to be both wide and deep — usually, it’s hard enough to try to focus on just one or the other — but Nvidia is nothing if not an ambitious company.

They announced so many different things that it’s hard to keep up (logistics, video processing, genomics, medical instruments, quantum computing, new hardware, net partnerships, new cloud services, etc)…

One of the coolest parts of the presentation begins around 22:32mins into it. If you only look at one part, I recommend this one.

It shows the inner workings of a virtual ASML machine doing EUV photolithography — if you’ve ever wondered what is going on inside these magic machines at TSMC, this is a great way to get a glimpse.

Their visual explanation of computational lithography and how the patterns on the mask don’t resemble the patterns etched on silicon is great. If only every classroom had animations as good as Nvidia presentations… 👩‍🏫

Of course, Nvidia has a new library to help accelerate computational lithography, developed in collaboration with ASML, TSMC, and Synopsys.

Running on GPUs, cuLitho delivers a performance leap of up to 40x beyond current lithography — the process of creating patterns on a silicon wafer — accelerating the massive computational workloads that currently consume tens of billions of CPU hours every year.

It enables 500 NVIDIA DGX H100 systems to achieve the work of 40,000 CPU systems [...]

In the near term, fabs using cuLitho could help produce each day 3-5x more photomasks — the templates for a chip’s design — using 9x less power than current configurations.

There’s footage of Jensen delivering the first H100 DGX to OpenAI and signing the server:

It reminds me of how Steve Jobs made the people who worked on the original Macintosh sign the motherboard because “artists sign their work”.

Jensen: “We are the iPhone moment of AI” 📱

I had to give this one a bigger font because it feels like that kind of proclamation.