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Thursday, Dec 14, 2023 - 23:37 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Reopening Ceremony


Promotion decisions can seem a little random


Some possibly-fortuitous happenings have had me re-evaluate my legacy commitments, and I figured that it might be time to move on from some of my... older hobbies - for now at least - to prioritize my official work and likely more-remunerative activities. Amongst the latter would be the revival of the crypto investment firm that I've been a silent partner in since late 2013, and which has survived - and even thrived - when numerous more-famous ones have fallen by the wayside.

This, then, can be attributed to the careful selection of management personnel, although not a few of my more-tightly-wound acquaintances have gotten a bit miffed when crypto comes up in discussion (usually when a new mania starts), and I inform them that my fund is run by a hamster. It might not have been that amusing a jest, on hindsight - just a little jibe to spice the discourse up. And now for the real secret:

There are two hamsters.

You understand, surely, that running a successful crypto investment firm is beyond the capabilities of any single hamster. No, at least two there must be, like Buffett & Munger, Jobs & Wozniak, Cheech & Chong, Will Smith & Jackie Chan, big target man and small nippy support forward in football, dominating center and slippery outside shooter in basketball, etc. The basic idea is to have a plump, marginally-morally-challenged ham as the CEO, and the other more-numerically-versed one as the analyst. And then replace their trading terminal with an offline simulator in bear season. Hey, it works, don't knock it.


No Chip For You

With NVIDIA's Huang having moved on to sample some pho in Hanoi, the latest developments in the Washington-Beijing tech (cold) war of containment have seen Huawei claim a 5nm processor (on which the U.S. immediately called doubt and accused intellectual property theft), together with the U.S. government supposedly willing to compromise with NVIDIA over the sales of their chips to China, according to their Commerce Secretary - if not the "[best] AI chips, which would enable China to train their frontier models".

On this strategy, there might be at least two obvious issues, the first of which is that it is hardly clear that (enough of) the so-called second-line "eunuch" chips that are available for export to China, would be unable to handle frontier model training. The export-ready H20 chip is for example merely reduced from the H100 to be some seven times slower, but also 20% faster for LLM reasoning. Even without accounting for distributed learning across multiple (already-purchased) chips, a speed differential of less than an order of magnitude hardly seems like a fatal impediment even at the cutting edge.

The second issue is then the near-impossibility of enforcing grey-market re-exports of the best chips anyway, especially if it involves multiple transactions. This might not even require the physical transfer of the chips; consider a commercial data centre packed with H100s in, say, Singapore - would there be anything preventing a Chinese entity from going through a middleman shell company in Denmark or Indonesia or South Africa - which might not even have any ties to China in their official records - and booking training time on the H100s? One simple workaround would be to develop more-innocuous frontier models on such external systems, before reapplying the gained knowledge to perform the final fine-tuning using the actually-sensitive data back home. Heck, if a proper consultant can't think of half a dozen more loopholes, he likely isn't trying.


Perhaps Premature Pats

Dropped by the healthcare carnival at the F1 Pit Building last Saturday, where our Health Minister gamely posed for photos at the mock Multi-Ministry Taskforce (MTF) press conference table. While some appreciation for the frontliners was overdue, the timing was perhaps not the most ideal, with coronavirus cases again spiking as hospitals get overcrowded once more. There doesn't appear to be too much on-the-ground concern - or drama over vaccination - despite some 5,000 cases daily, as compared to the scenes during the initial outbreak.

As for the over 110,000 Covid-19 Resilience Medals distributed at the event, a handful had been put up for sale online at upwards of S$300, which drew a request from the government to treat them with respect. While one does understand the sentiment, it isn't as if far more-exclusive awards such as Olympic Golds and Victoria Crosses haven't changed hands for cash - and if the fellow who put his Resilience Medal up for a million bucks does get a buyer, well, maybe a lack of respect and dignity can hardly be automatically inferred, can it?



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