I'm getting some semantic satiation with "billions."
From GeekWire, November 3:
ChatGPT maker OpenAI, exercising newfound freedom under its renegotiated Microsoft partnership, will expand its cloud footprint for training and running AI models to Amazon’s infrastructure under a new seven-year, $38 billion agreement.
The deal, announced Monday, positions Amazon as a major infrastructure provider for Microsoft’s flagship AI partner, highlighting seemingly insatiable demand for computing power and increasingly complex alliances among big companies seeking to capitalize on AI.
It comes as Microsoft, Amazon, and big tech companies attempt to reassure investors who’ve grown concerned about a possible bubble in AI spending and infrastructure investment.
Under its new Amazon deal, OpenAI is slated to begin running AI workloads on Amazon Web Services’ new EC2 UltraServers, which use hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs. Amazon says the infrastructure will help to run ChatGPT and train future OpenAI models.
Amazon shares rose nearly 5% in early trading after the announcement.
“Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in the press release announcing the deal. “Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone.”
Matt Garman, the AWS CEO, said in the release that Amazon’s cloud infrastructure will serve as “a backbone” for OpenAI’s ambitions.
In an interview with CNBC, Dave Brown, Amazon’s vice president of compute and machine learning services, said the new agreement represents “completely separate capacity” that AWS is building out for OpenAI. “Some of that capacity is already available, and OpenAI is making use of that,” Brown told CNBC.
Amazon has also been deepening its investment in AI infrastructure for Anthropic, the rival startup behind the Claude chatbot. Amazon has invested and committed a total of $8 billion in Anthropic and recently opened Project Rainier, an $11 billion data center complex for Anthropic’s workloads, running on hundreds of thousands of its custom Trainium 2 chips....
....MUCH MORE
Billions. From October 24's "Google and Anthropic wave hands about mega TPU deal worth 'tens of billions'"I had a similar reaction: "What's with the 'tens of billions'" when I saw the news yesterday, probably because I had just read Carl Sagan swear he never said "billions and billions."
I never said it. Honest. Oh, I said there are maybe 100 billion galaxies and 10 billion trillion stars. It’s hard to talk about the Cosmos without using big numbers. I said "billion" many times on the Cosmos television series, which was seen by a great many people. But I never said "billions and billions." For one thing, it’s too imprecise. How many billions DUH "billions and billions"? A few billion? Twenty billion? A hundred billion? "Billions and billions" is pretty vague. When we reconfigured and updated the series, I checked—and sure enough, I never said it.
But Johnny Carson—on whose Tonight Show I'd appeared almost thirty times over the years—said it.
He'd dress up in a corduroy jacket, a turtleneck sweater, and something like a mop for a wig. He had created a rough imitation of me, a kind of Doppelganger, that went around saying "billions and billions" on late-night television. It used to bother me a little to have some simulacrum of my persona wandering off on its own, saying things that friends and colleagues would report to me the next morning. (Despite the disguise, Carson—a serious amateur astronomer—would often make my imitation talk real science.)
Astonishingly, "billions and billions" stuck. People liked the sound of it. Even today, I'm stopped on the street or on an airplane or at a party and asked, a little shyly, if I wouldn't—-just for them—say "billions and billions.""You know, I didn't actually say it," I tell them.
"It's okay," they reply. "Say it anyway."I'm told that Sherlock Holmes never said, "Elementary, my dear Watson" (at least in the Arthur Conan Doyle books); Jimmy Cagney never said, "You dirty rat"; and Humphrey Bogart never said, "Play it again, Sam." But they might as well have, because these apocrypha have firmly insinuated themselves into popular culture.
I'm still quoted as uttering this simple-minded phrase in computer magazines ("As Carl Sagan would say, it takes billions and billions of bytes"), newspaper economics primers, discussions of players' salaries in professional sports, and the like.
For a while, out of childish pique, I wouldn't utter or write the phrase, even when asked to. But I've gotten over that. So, for the record, here goes: "Billions and billions."....
And from October 29's "Jamie Powell, Winston Churchill, and Anthony Downs On A Variant Of Semantic Satiation":
....And the original meaning of 'semantic satiation'?
Semantic satiation is a phenomenon whereby the uninterrupted repetition of a word eventually leads to a sense that the word has lost its meaning. This effect is also known as semantic saturation or verbal satiation.
The concept of semantic satiation was described by E. Severance and M.F. Washburn in The American Journal of Psychology in 1907. The term was introduced by psychologists Leon James and Wallace E. Lambert in the article "Semantic Satiation Among Bilinguals" in the Journal of Experimental Psychology (1961)....MORE at ThoughtCo
So two rules: 1) Don't bore your audience; 2) Don't drone on and on to the point that people no longer hear or care what you are trying to express....
