On Sept 3rd, 2023, we held a symposium.
In this video, I want to do a brief recap of what happened and invite you to the next
one.
The idea for the symposium first popped up when Dylan told me that both he and Doug O'Laughlin
of Fabricated Knowledge were coming to Taipei in September.
Dylan and I had held a small meetup back in May.
That was a blast.
So now that all three of us are here, we should have something a bit bigger.
And thus came about the AI and Semiconductor Symposium.
Dylan did his magic and found some amazing guests, which we will talk about later.
And we booked a venue in early August.
It was a beautiful ballroom at the NTU Hospital International Convention Center.
We made the first announcement a week later and by the time sales closed, we had over
400 signups.
I am not going to lie, I was incredibly anxious in the days before the event - setting up
seating options, coordinating slides between all the participants, so on.
It felt like being back in university.
And then if we are not lucky enough, we have Typhoon Haikui approaching Taiwan.
For a few days we worried over what would happen if the storm hit Taipei head on.
But fortunately (for us) the storm turned south.
## Day of the Event
The day of the event, we all met at a wonderful cafe in Beitou called INTRO Kitchen.
I highly recommend it to everyone.
Go check it out.
Now, I should mention that Dylan sprained his ankle last week whilst drunk dancing.
He has been walking around on it for the past whole week and now it's not doing well.
So with the event starting about an hour and a half away, we take him to the traditional
Chinese medicine clinic to treat his foot.
The doctor says it will take 20 minutes, and now I am really freaking out.
I show up at the Room at 12:30 PM and there are already 30 people waiting.
We go up and down the aisles, marking the seat sections so people can sit down.
Meanwhile, we are taking attendance outside.
Our esteemed Master of Ceremony Rita arranges a maniacal car ride back from Beitou to the
NTUH Convention center.
Dylan arrives 20 minutes late and now we are off and running!
## Frankwell Lin
Our first talk was by Frankwell Lin, Chairman and CEO of Andes Technology Group.
He also serves on the board of the RISC-V International Association.
Andes Technology Group is a semiconductor IP company providing IC design services for
other companies.
They also develop a series of hardware and software products.
Frankwell discussed AI accelerators including those using photonics and their strong position
in RISC-V.
He also went over potential methods to continue realizing performance improvements in digital
electronics - Moore's Law.
New materials and devices, which take time.
Or architectural specialization and something Frankwell calls "extreme heterogeneity".
The use of very specialized chips for certain applications - as aided by the newly released
chiplet standard - Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express, or UCIe.
It was a great and informative talk about a company more people should know.
## Dylan Patel
Dylan did our second talk.
He opened with a metaphor discussing just how computationally expensive AI can be.
If you printed out the parameters of a good but not leading edge model like BERT onto
a piece of paper, then that stack of paper would go all the way from Philadelphia to
Chicago.
GPT-4 on the other hand would go all the way to the Moon and back, 10 times over.
Dylan's talk was on model requirements for hardware and future scaling, as well as future
model architecture and what hardware those models might need.
He walked through the memory hierarchy, and some of the training costs for the largest
leading edge models.
He also compared the costs of running ChatGPT and a Google Search, which was pretty interesting.
By the way, I find it funny how every time he shows a new slide, a bunch of people lift
their phones to take a picture of it.
## Warren Lau
After that, the third talk was by Warren Lau - senior analyst from the Hong Kong-based
Aletheia Capital.
He walked us through some of his fund's theses especially with regards to the AI boom and
the AI supply chain.
Making these new AI products like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot mean buying and installing
lots of AI servers.
Nvidia is the most prominently featured of these suppliers, but there are many others.
A high-end AI server is estimated to cost some $180,000 - with the GPU capturing about
89% of that.
There was also some discussion of AMD's upcoming MI300 processor - the first CPU+GPU combo
- comparing them to the H100 accelerator.
Overall, I felt it was an insightful journey into the massive network of vendors feeding
into ChatGPT.
## Doug O'Laughlin
Doug is a brilliant analyst and he really brought some fire to the show.
He talked about China's big push into the lagging edge semiconductor industry.
This has been something a lot of people and myself have been thinking about for a long
time.
I was going to do a video about it.
He went over his supporting items for the thesis.
There is a great wave of digitization in the car industry happening right now, and that
requires more car silicon.
China holds a substantial cost and market advantage in EV production, and they are leveraging
these advantages to generate immense capacity to flood the market with EV exports.
Many of these EV makers are vertically integrated.
They are building these Fabs for their own internal use, which distorts the systems'
whole economics.
And with the Chinese no longer able to import leading edge semiconductor manufacturing equipment,
it has completely shifted them towards dominating the lagging edge.
What this means is that traditional automotive semiconductor OEMs will be hit hard by this
new wave of competition and capacity.
Very provocative thesis and I think more than a few friends in the audience were quite moved
by it.
## Me
For my talk, I shared a story about American lithography companies.
The video containing the full version of the story will be shared a bit later so wait for
that.
But let me share the little story I told at the start.
I remember when I first started at the channel, I made my first video about TSMC early on.
The video did better than others that I have done and I thought I struck gold!
But then I looked at the search terms that were bringing people to the video and noticed
one of the top terms was "TSMC Minecraft".
And I was like "What?"
Turns out, there is a very large YouTuber called TSMC Minecraft and he makes Minecraft
tutorials.
A not insignificant portion of views coming to the channel were not interested in TSMC
the chipmaker at all, but TSMC the Minecrafter.
That was pretty amusing.
## Panel Q&A
After this, Dylan had not yet finished his slides so we started the panel a bit early.
It was also very nice to get Jordan Schneider of ChinaTalk up on the forum too.
He was a bit jet lagged but I loved having him on there.
We used a service called Slido to collect questions.
People could upvote the questions they wanted to answer.
We could not possibly get through all the questions that we received though, sadly.
There were some very entertaining moments.
Dylan was asked about a possible AI server bust and he cooked up a big rant about how
Jensen likes to go all with the chip double orders when the going is good.
Dylan then goes on to say that will eventually lead to a bust and a subsequent write down
in inventory.
You can’t say Dylan isn’t afraid to speak his mind.
## Dylan 2
Dylan went up again the second time, talking about his "GPU-Poor" concept that he brought
up in a prior newsletter.
In it, he focused on Google and their massive computing advantage.
There were some very fun references to Google's MEMS-based optical switches and how they dynamically
reroute traffic.
A friend of mine who worked at Google before came to the show and told me via chat that
"everything he is saying about Google is pure Google thinking".
And of course, he showed the now-infamous chart that got Sam Altman calling him Google
marketing/recruiting on TwitterX.
With Elon his X-ness himself replying to said Tweet.
## Mingling and End
And with that, we were done!
Despite the late start, we finished exactly on time at 5 PM.
Since we had the room until 6 PM, there was extra time to mingle.
Naturally, they all ran for the stars of the show - Doug and Dylan.
These two guys are legitimate celebrities.
My favorite part was when someone brought a real wafer - a binned one, it seems - for
us three to sign.
I am told that when Dylan was signing it, he was able to identify what the chips were.
Crazy.
I was suffering from back spasms that day - thanks to the stress of putting this whole
thing on.
But regardless, it was a pleasure to talk to each and every one of you.
I had a blast learning about what you guys do.
## Conclusion
Nearly 200 people showed up despite short notice and a raging typhoon outside.
I am stunned and grateful for all of you who came out.
To those people, you are the real MVPs.
For those who were not able to make it, I am sorry to have missed you.
Come by for the next one ... whenever it shall happen.