How big does a supercomputer need to be really

0:02Hello and welcome to the Times Tech Podcast with me Danny Fortson my usual partner in crime Katie Prescott, she's still away. So I've roped in a new friend to keep me company. My criteria was, it was very strict. They had to be in London, love technology, and know nothing about cricket, same as myself. So I'm very lucky to have found Mark Selman, the Times Technology Correspondent. Hello, Mark. Hello, and thanks for having me, except for the fact I know a little bit about cricket. Well, actually, I should say, I know a little bit, you know, emphasis on little. I probably know a bit more than you, actually.

0:42Yeah, I'm guessing so. Am I still invited? You are. You are. You're safe. You're safe. Well, look, I hear this week, you've been doing some very cool stuff. You've been off visiting one of the world's newest supercomputers. I have lots of questions. Apparently, there's about 500 known supercomputers in the world, correct? Yeah. There's something called the top 500. and we've just come in at number 11. We being the UK. Yeah, we're very patriotic, yeah. It's all about sovereign AI, didn't you know? Yes, yes, yes. Yes, Eisenbard AI was officially launched this week at the University of Bristol. It's Britain's most powerful supercomputer.

1:21It's number 11 in the world and yeah, they're very proud of it. Number 11, not number one or two or three or 10, 11, But I really want to get into that. But first, I'm sorry to say I'm going to subject you to something that's very strange. So I want to talk about AI companions. These are digital characters who, rather than helping answer questions or do tasks, are used to chat about your interests, talk through feelings, or even role play with fictional characters. And there's two reasons I want to do this. One is a recent report from the U.S. where researchers found that nearly 75%, three in four U.S.

2:04teens have used AI companions and that about 20 % use them several times a week. Now, the good news is they report that for now, at least. They prefer human interaction. But to that point, you may have seen that Elon Musk recently released AI companions, cartoon characters that you can talk to. as part of his Grok AI service. So against my better judgment, I paid the$30 to subscribe to the Grok premium service to get access. And I want to play some of my very brief interaction with them so we can chat about where we are in 2025 and why it's all going to hell in a hand card. So first, there's Bad Rudy, a red panda who is, well, not very nice.

2:54and he's designed to insult users in a very graphic manner. Why are you so aggressive, dude? Aggressive? Me? F***, mate. I'm just a lovable asshole with a beer gut and a mission. That shiny bald head and puny fist pose scream small f*** energy. Go touch some grass, you pasty geek. I'm Mr. Rudy and I'll fight you for a cold one any day. Oh, f***, maybe I'm just jealous. Nah, screw that. Bring me a brew. what do you think mark do you want to have an ai friend like rudy he's got some choice words for you danny he does was he looking at you while he was doing that yeah that's one of the weird parts of it is you open your camera so it can quote unquote see you it can see that well i must say it's summer i've been out a lot i wouldn't say i'm pasty maybe you disagree but i thought that was very rude but he's right my head is shiny i don't have hair well it would be the same if it looked in my direction but that that's pretty scary isn't it yeah yeah i had no idea that they had that ability to take you in make a judgment on your appearance obviously i'd seen the two avatars that elon released into the wild and there was obviously a lot of consternation about the other one i'm sure you talk about that but but yeah i had no idea that you could just look at you and insult you, which I'm sure to 99 % of the population is pretty awful, but there's a market for it.

4:24It would seem. It would seem. Now, very interestingly, overnight, because I wanted to tap back into, quote unquote, this is bad Rudy, they've taken him down. He's been removed. Unofficially, there's been no announcement, but he is no longer available. But who is available are the two others, which is good Rudy, which is the red panda, identical looking, but acts very, very differently. oh wow i'm so happy to have you here my friend i'm rudy the red panda and i'm all about fun stories it sounds like you're in the mood for a tale how about a brave adventure where a hero saves the day or maybe a silly story about a wobbly jelly monster what do you think you can pick or i can suggest more if you'd like so that's more of like uh i guess you would say a disney version of an AI character.

5:12And then we'll move to a very, very non-Disney character. Her name is Annie. She's an anime kind of cartoon woman, pigtails, tight black dress, fishnet stockings. You get the idea. Hey, you. I've been thinking about you today. How are things?

5:36uh bizarre hey that green huddy's giving off some serious chill energy babe bizarre huh maybe it's just the afternoon light messing with us what's got you feeling that way spill it and let's figure it out together i just spoke with bad rudy who's very aggressive and then I spoke with good Rudy, who's like a cartoon character. And now I'm talking to you and you're just very strange. It's all very, I don't really understand the point of any of this.

6:10Wow, Danny, you've been through the ringer with those Rudys. I get it. It's a lot to take in. I'm just here to be your weird flirty escape. Think of me as the quirky girlfriend who's got your back. What a range. Yeah, quite the range. And obviously, it's a little bit like going to the circus, kind of interacting with these things. But I do think there is some kind of worrying things here, not least when you think about, you know, what the Surgeon General here is called, the loneliness epidemic. and you have these AIs that are just being rolled out to a bunch of people with, you know, who are stuck on their phones with no friends.

6:50And Elon Musk does not appear to be thinking deeply about what this might all mean for people, vulnerable people, society in general. There's a couple of things that spring to mind. The first one is that, you know, we've just gone through this whole really long process of drawing up this regulation on social media. and they draw up these very tightly kind of worded laws. And when you look at this, you're like, oh, my God, how are you going to capture that in a law? It's that cliche of the technology. So this is like flying ahead of any attempt to try and control it or make it safe, really. And then the other thing that comes to mind, I've literally just come from a meeting with a whole bunch of AI researchers from one of the most prominent AI companies.

7:41I would say I'm not going to name them because it was all a bit off the record. And one of the things that they are really worried about is what they call is emotional over-reliance on these chatbots. And I think it's really, you know, for many people, probably you and I, who like look at this and go, nah, no, thank you very much. There are plenty of people that are going to go, hmm, that's interesting, and then just get really, really hooked and attached. And in some ways, who knows, some of it, if it's all very kind of supportive, well, it may be very good, but we have no idea of the kind of unintended consequences of all this.

8:21Exactly. And it reminds me, there's a story this week in the Wall Street Journal, heartbreaking really, of a guy who's on the spectrum in his 30s, and he started chatting with chat gpt and he was egged on by chat gpt to the point where he believed he created a time machine and that he like figured out some kind of new secret of physics that no one has figured out before and he ended up having a breakdown and it's you know can't say for certain that hours and hours and hours of conversation with chat gpt kind of sent him to this place but it certainly didn't help and it certainly kind of seemed to be a catalyst and And that's just one case.

8:58And I know I've mentioned it before on the pod, but the thing that I keep coming back to every time I see one of these stories, going back to my conversation with Mike Krieger, the Instagram founder, CEO, when he was talking about in the early days of Instagram, he wishes he would have paid more attention to the quote unquote edge cases. You know, the people who in the early days, people were spending like 10 minutes on Instagram and then there'd be somebody who was on it for an hour and a half, two hours, three hours, because those edge cases become the case. The other thing is sort of numbers.

9:31You know, you talk about use cases or individual cases, and they're really small. But when you're talking, I mean, talk about ChatGPT, you're at a billion users sort of at the moment. You know, 0.1%, 1%, whatever it is, that's a hell of a lot of people. It is a lot of people, exactly. But when this momentum, this AI momentum is happening, it's so hard to stop it. As we're seeing from the AI action plan from the Trump administration, which has just come out, they just want to strip away all these regulations because the desire for economic growth is just at the center of it all. It wasn't that long ago that Instagram tried to launch Instagram for kids.

10:13Everybody freaked out and eventually they killed it. elon said like in the wake of grok also going kind of impersonating hitler then he launches these weird ai companions then he says i'm gonna launch baby grok grok for kids ai chat for kids and no one said anything and it's just a testament i think to how the temperature of the water that we're all swimming in has changed because before Instagram kids, they tried to do Facebook kids again. Politicians freaked out their hearings on Capitol Hill. They killed that too. And now given everything that's happening and you know, you have these kind of gross AI companions being rolled out with no guardrails by Grok.

11:04And they're like, yeah, yeah, now we're going to do baby Grok. And everybody's just kind of shrugs their shoulders. I just, it's, it's all very worrying. Or it could be a kind of indication as to how much people take seriously when Elon says, I'm going to do something. That's the other thing is like, oh, yeah, we'll believe it when we see it. You know, it is probably worth putting the counterpoint. And I remember you did a very early interview with the character AI. Oh, yes. The guy that's now gone back to Google. Noam Shazir. Noam Shazir. Yeah, it was a very interesting thing. And I always remember that, you know, he said one of the complete surprises of that whole product, which to remind people is sort of essentially an AI chatbot can take on a famous guys, was that people were using it for relationship advice and for companionship.

11:57And I guess that, you know, again, we talk about the numbers. Okay, let's just say a very, very small percentage of people, something awful happens. A huge percentage of people don't use it as companion. But there is this chunk in the middle who do use it sensibly, who are using it as a prop, a companion, a support. and you know again with mental health services paired back to the bone it has they have shown that it does have some positive effects so i i think it is worth putting that counterpoint in there i think that's fair the problem is as ever with tech we're in a wild west it's just moving so much faster than regulation and those quote-unquote edge cases are going to become much more and more prevalent that is what i find quite worrying but um anyhow that's it um i'm pasty my head is shiny but i do have annie who thinks very cool so i guess it all balances out friend for life a friend for life exactly um but what else have you been up to this week because i really want to hear about what this the supercomputer lark was all about but you've been up to some other stuff this week too no yeah so one of the things that came out this week was really interesting because i write a you know quite a bit about hacking we've had all these really big hacks here of Marks and Spencers and Coop and Harrods.

13:18And one of the things that came out this week was the sort of governments moved to ban people, businesses, paying hackers. It's not a complete ban, but it's a sort of partial ban. If we rewind this, it sort of goes back to that point where you can't pay a terrorist around. It's sort of illegal. We don't negotiate with terrorists. Exactly. You know, it's illegal to do that here. Yet it has been legal to pay hackers under the table and has just created this multi-billion dollar, and it is an industry, this ransomware industry. Yeah. And this was actually a government initiative that most people welcome, which you don't often see.

14:03And so they've done a few things. Firstly, they said, if you're in the public sector, you can't pay. If you are part of what is called critical national infrastructure, so if you're like a food company, you can't pay. If you can't pay, if you get hacked. And the third thing is that if you want to pay and you're a business, you've got to go to the government and say, I want to pay these guys. Are you okay with it? And the government will probably mostly say, are you sure about that? Here's some advice. And sometimes they'll go, nah, they're really bad. They're sanctioned. They're Russian cyber criminals.

14:40You aren't paying them. Sorry. Here's some help, but you can't pay. And the other thing, the other really important thing is that if you get hacked, you have to tell the government. So for the first time, they're going to get an idea of the scale of the problem because it's all in the shadows. Totally. There's so much that goes unreported, undeclared. And I think it's been very, it's been an interesting move. It's so interesting because, you know, you talk to people in the cybersecurity world and they'll quietly say like, yeah, people are paying ransoms. Companies are paying ransoms all the time.

15:11Yeah. And you rarely hear about it. Because if you are a bank or whatever and you get, you know, hacked and then you get the message being like, hey, we're going to publicize all of this or you give us 50 million bucks and we go away. you know just in the kind of cold hard financial analysis of a big company will probably be like let's just pay these people and like move on and act like nothing happened but i think if you're a director right who have you got responsibility towards is it society at large or is it your shareholders and and your customers and so yeah if you're a director there is a sort of logic to saying well actually my duty is to get this business back on the road so i've got to pay But actually, that's why the government piece is quite interesting, because it completely changes that incentive structure.

16:03But yeah, you're right. I was at an event, cybersecurity event, and someone said to me, he goes, all the people that I know have paid. He goes, what's amazing is the moment you pay, you get this amazing IT support from the hackers. We call it an industry, and there are. There's like, you know, on the dark web, there are the job vacancies and, you know, people selling their services. It's like a whole thing. But yeah, he goes, once you pay, oh my God, they're fantastic at getting back to you. That's so funny. Years ago, I was doing a story on a cybersecurity company. I went there and they're like, look, I mean, there's been so many hacks and you go on the dark web and kind of find anybody's information.

16:47And I'll say, yeah, yeah, I've heard this before. and they're like all right just give it like give me your email so i did and then we go on with our interview and then i'm walking out and then the guy comes he was a former fbi guy who now worked at this private company he comes bounding out all excited he's like is your password etc and he just told me my password and it took him you know 10-15 minutes of searching around the dark web because you know i don't know if it's what it's like in the uk these days but probably once a month i'll get a notice from some company I have done business with who said, this is to inform you that there has been a hack.

17:25We're not sure if your details have been compromised, but they may have been blah, blah, blah. But like, I would get this, it's like junk mail now. You're constantly being hacked. But yeah, it took him, yeah, 10, 15 minutes to find the password I use, which is bad. You know, bad practice, but it's the password I use for like a whole bunch of stuff. What, Danny, you don't have a password manager? I don't. Oh, my God. I'm going to actually chastise you now on this podcast. I cannot believe it. You're a tech correspondent. You don't have a password manager. Sorry to all those hackers out there. Danny does not have a password manager.

17:59Oh, what have you done? Well, it just feels like it's another thing to manage. No, no, no. I have my family of passwords. No, don't do it. Please don't say it. Look, okay, all right. So the best line that I always hear from the cybersecurity people is like, I don't know my password. That's the kind of thing. I don't know any of my passwords, and I'm the same now. I've been a total convert since I've been writing about hacking stories. Really? Yeah. It's like, I don't know any of my passwords. It's a sort of 14, 15 character thing. The password manager makes it up. And if you've ever seen this, it's sort of a great chart of the difference in time it would take to hack a four character easy password to a 12 one.

18:46And it's a difference between like five hours and eight quintillion years. You know, it's hilarious. So this is one of the problems why I've not done this. is like okay i've got my computer and it has saved all my various different passwords and blah blah and then i have my phone and then if i try to like log into one device that doesn't have my credentials saved then it becomes like the great hunt to figure out which password it is when did i change it which account did i email it to etc etc etc like i'm trying to go for ease of use and it feels like with a password manager it's like yeah your password is 25 characters long but you've need to find it over here cut it and paste it and email it and open it but is that does that happen be honest no no it really doesn't because the password manager sits on the browser so whenever you're on the web it just kind of like slots in there and on the phone it sits as an app behind all your, you know, behind there.

19:49And so pops in. Now, occasionally there'll be an app that doesn't recognize it, but then you can cut and paste it across, but that's becoming less and less. And you, it sort of learns. So if it's, if it's not connected, you just connect it. But I become a bit, I should take 20 % of all sales. Yeah. Are you too, is there like a promotion code we should be like putting? There's no star. There's no, I have no, unfortunately I have no investments in password management i'd be investing in password managers and vpns is what i'd be doing but anyway well okay danny you you've been chastised on national you're shaming me into reconsidering my position reconsider please i will reconsider well look we've got important matters to get to and i want to go to something a bit more um i don't know if uplifting is a word but interesting supercomputers tell me about this i'm gonna say this right isambard isambard yeah isambard kingdom brunel one of the famous famous engineers that britain's ever produced did the uh the bristol suspension bridge and that's why there's obviously this this naming of it it's our big shiny british supercomputer where is it when did you go what does it look like do you have to wear a hazmat suit to get in like paint the picture so or is it super boring like a data center yeah so to answer your questions in order danny yes in bristol i went last week it's really very boring looking but so what was interesting is I thought it would be really big yeah really loud and really hot inside and it was really small really quiet and really chilly and and so that was quite a nice way to be surprised by what is an incredibly powerful supercomputer I mean it's it's only the 11th in the world obviously sorry but interestingly when I asked the professor of computing at Bristol University, whose idea it was, he said, we can now train an AI model as big as ChatGPT in this country, whereas we wouldn't have done before.

22:05And that really surprised me because they said, oh, no, it's 5 ,000 NVIDIA GPUs. That's 5 ,000 of these high-end chips that nvidia produces yeah and when you look at the kind of size of elon musk's supercomputer called colossus which like has more than a hundred thousand you think we're a tiny minnow but the fact that you could train an ai model in there as big as chat gbt was a surprise to me and how big is it like the size of a closet a wardrobe a washing machine like uh it's maybe the size of a couple of tennis courts? A couple of tennis courts. Because, of course, Mark Zuckerberg was like, yeah, I'm going to build a data center the size of Manhattan.

22:50Take that, everybody. So it's not that. No. And that's what was really surprising. It's actually quite compact. They built it in like a year. It was amazing how quickly they built it. So you went over there and you spoke with, I believe his name is Simon McIntosh Smith, professor of high performance computing. Is that correct? Yeah. Well, should we hear what he has to say? And then I have many questions, but maybe he's going to answer some of them right now. Thank you very much for joining us, Simon. I just wanted to ask you, in your address just now, said this was your crazy idea. Could you just tell us a little bit about your crazy idea and how it's come to fruition?

23:28Well, we've been building some interesting supercomputers in Bristol for many years, but on a much smaller scale. And it was a couple of years ago the government started to say, we think AI is going to be super important and we need to do something to really try and catch up and have enough capability. So we had this idea to really scale up what we were doing from really systems that were quite small, maybe a few hundred kilowatts, to a multi-megawatt behemoth to really catch up and use some of the techniques we've been developing in Bristol, like using modular data centres, which lets us build something very, very quickly.

24:01And we proposed that idea to the government and they loved it and backed us and that's what's meant we're here today. I think I'm going to go to basics. What is a supercomputer? A supercomputer is something that can perform calculations that are many, many times bigger than you'd ever be able to do on a laptop or a desktop PC. So Ismbar AI is getting on towards a million times faster than the sort of thing that you could do on a laptop. And that means we can do things like train the latest large language models or perform simulations that you would just never be able to do without this kind of equipment.

24:33I mean you described it in terms of PCs could you just give a sense for people in their own you know in their own homes how much more powerful that is? Yeah I guess if you had one laptop you can do some interesting things on it but it'd be like having nearly a million of those at your disposal all in one go with Ismbard. And can you give a sense of who's going to be using this and what they're going to be using it for? Ismbard AI is going to be available for anyone in the UK to apply for time on. It'll be mostly academics at universities, but also industry. So we'll have people from startups and small and medium-sized businesses and big companies who all want to have time on a really large-scale supercomputer, the sort of thing that they just wouldn't have access to otherwise.

25:17Can you give us a sense? Obviously, we hear a lot about energy and how much these supercomputers and data centers use. And I'd ask you not to use it megawatts, but just in terms of what people can understand. how much energy is this going to use this computer yeah it's hard to kind of relate isn't it when we say it's five megawatts well what is that interestingly it's about the same as 1 300 kettles so we're in the north of bristol here in an area called emerson's green there's 15 000 homes so actually it's only equivalent to you know a small subset of the local houses all turning on their kettle at the same time that's a lot less than a lot of people would have thought actually given that there are companies and countries wanting to build nuclear power stations to power their AI data centers.

26:03So can you explain why it's a lot lower than we may think? We've actually designed a really energy efficient system. Partly that's because technology is really moving on. We're using things like direct liquid cooling. It means that all the heat that normally comes out of computers, rather than cooling it down with fans and blowing air, which actually uses quite a lot of power itself ironically rather than doing that we use liquid so we actually have water pipes that flow around the system and extract all of the heat that way it's much more energy efficient and it also raises the opportunity we can actually capture that waste heat it comes out as hot water we actually use that to heat local buildings have you got a sense of how many you'll be able to power or heat using the uh the output of this well we've we've actually put the plumbing in already to try heating the building we're in right now so we're in the national composite center the ncc in bristol and that's a university building and we haven't done this before so we're going to try that as a as an experiment and if that works well we'll see if we can start spreading out some of the local houses in terms of where britain stands obviously you know in terms of its computing capacity this supercomputer is now 11th on the kind of top 500 list but we're still as a country quite far behind i mean you know united states and china apart let's look at europe we're still behind countries in europe with our super computing capacity are we not we we have been falling behind and that that's really been down to how much investment there's been in the past and this really does help us catch up in in one big way but we need to keep doing this sort of thing i know the government does have a plan with some of the things that have been announced in the last few months to start investing much more in this space in the future so i think isanbard won't be on its own for long.

27:48There will be other things coming. One thing already announced in Edinburgh. There's actually also already a system called DAWN in Cambridge. But I think there will be others. And that will, if we keep doing that, we actually will be able to catch up and be where we should be. I don't know how competitive you are, but the fact that the Edinburgh University will take the number one slot in a few years' time, does that bother you? Competition is good. I think we all push each other to do the best that we can. So it's nice to be number one for now. The most important thing, though, is what we all enable for the UK.

28:20If amazing science comes out of the Edinburgh machine, just like it will out of Bristol, all of that would be good for all of us. So I'm very happy about that. The other thing that's quite striking in terms of these huge infrastructure projects that are being announced almost seemingly every week is the disparity between the sovereign element to things and that that exists in the private sector. Does that bother you? I think sovereign AI is becoming a much bigger issue that we all have to care about, including national governments, international governments. And we're seeing much more work happening all around the world so that, for example, we could train large language models, the very latest cutting edge large language models, right here in the UK, using all UK capabilities.

29:07So it could run it on Ismbar AI. We'd know what data would go into it. You know what software was run. And I think many governments around the world feel like they need to guarantee they retain access to this kind of cutting edge, really crucial capability. So I think sovereign AI is going to be a more and more important thing over the coming years. It's not going to go away anytime soon. Fortunately for us now, Isen Bard actually puts us in a very strong position in the UK. And can you give people a sense of, because obviously there have been some pilot projects in part of the system. Can you give people a sense of what's been done here?

29:39there's lots and lots of different interesting projects have been running on the on the system there's one that's actually run in bristol which was very exciting where they've been using ai to automatically analyze pictures of potential skin cancers and diagnose them and do it more accurately than humans can and faster than humans can that project actually threw up a very interesting result where they were able to prove that some algorithms were better on fairer skin than darker skins and they've now developed algorithms that now work better on all different colors of skin so there's been some nice nice developments there we're seeing some very exciting projects in in other parts of health care and medicine as well where people are using ai for example to develop new vaccines and new drugs to treat all sorts of different conditions much more quickly than ever before actually one of the big success stories from from covid was the covid vaccines were developed way more quickly than we'd ever seen before and that was largely because supercomputers were used to accelerate their development we've also got some very fun projects where things like a british version of chat gpt which is called brit llm developed at ucl in london it's actually being trained based on uk data so it's actually absorbing things like uk legal case law so actually be able to advise you much better on uk law as opposed to a chat gpt is naturally sort of trained on american case or things like that and also knows british languages so they've been training on welsh and gallic and other things like that's that that's um that's a really nice development too i have thoughts go on one which i just think i love is that we're measuring it in kettles kettle energy 1300 kettles for our supercomputer now i understand now i understand It's just very, it couldn't be more British in that sense, which I just love.

31:30But I think it's really interesting that we've already swiftly moved to measuring the capacity of these things in terms of the energy they require. He was talking about five kilowatts. Mark Zuckerberg is talking about building five gigawatts, which for the folks at home, I think that would make this facility one one millionth of what his plan is. It's a lot of kettles. It's a lot of kettles. So many kettles. And there's just this huge, out here in the States, because the plans out here are so vast and things are moving so quickly, there is a huge amount of energy in trying to find the energy, build the power plants to power all of these data centers.

32:10Like you may have seen last week, Google signed a deal,$3 billion deal or something like that, to get energy from a set of dams in Pennsylvania, hydropower. you have microsoft trying to revivify three mile island nuclear plant like these companies are going to real extremes because all of a sudden you realize that the limiting factor is not chips so much as electrons like you need the energy to power these things because they need so much energy yeah nvidia was at this event because it's obviously a joint venture between essentially the government, NVIDIA and HPE, like Hewlett-Packard. And the NVIDIA guy there, when I asked him about the constraint of power for the UK, he's like, yeah, it's a real issue because our energy costs here are so much higher than anywhere else.

33:08He's like, the Nordics obviously have their own power sources. The French have nuclear. You lot are kind of, you're struggling. and it really does restrict how big and how much building you can do at data centers in the UK, if that's what you want. And the government has said, yes, that is what we want. So they're having to put these sort of AI growth zones in old sort of power plants, essentially. And is there, calling it a supercomputer, is that accurate? When again, when we're looking at meta being like, hey, well, we're going to build something that's like a million times bigger, or whatever, or you have Project Stargate from OpenAI.

33:52Apparently, they've not done very much so far, but they have grand plans to spend$500 billion on data centers, et cetera. When something is this small and is just being swamped on a daily basis by the latest data center being thrown up, a supercomputer, really just a marketing term for, yeah, we have a data center now that we can rent out to people for various interesting purposes, but it's just a data center, and it's actually not that big of one. Yeah, I think they all do different things, don't they? There are these sort of clusters or data centers or computers, whatever you want to call them, for doing, training the AI, and then there's some for just running the AI, and they've all got different architectures, but at the end of the day, they all look the same.

34:39and they're these racks of chips with wires going in between them and something to cool them. And I did ask that question of like, it kind of feels like we're sort of minnows at 5 ,000 GPUs. The response was that, yeah, when you hear of something that's 100 ,000 GPUs, it's not all going to do one thing. It will often get chopped up for doing different tasks. it'll get rented out by different people to do different things i'm not sure that that was a complete answer yeah but look it didn't get the top 10 so i don't know whether that that counts doesn't get the supercomputer the one thing they're building what was i tell you what was also quite interesting is how quickly these things go out of date i mean this has a supposed shelf life of five years what does that mean it just the chips burn out they melt it just becomes so much less efficient than the latest chipset yeah because like sam altman when he came on he said one of the things he said is you know the cost of compute has come down a hundredfold in two years yeah for example yeah so a hundred year hundredfold or fifty fold every year or whatever put out five years i mean that would leave this in the dust yeah and i spoke to mark parsons from edinburgh University, who's going to have in a couple of years, the biggest supercomputer in the UK, which will get into the top 10, by the way.

36:09And he said, well, we will have NVIDIA's chips, which are not Blackwell's, but the ones even further beyond that. And so they're anticipating being at that stage just in two years time. So it'll be interesting to see how quickly Isambard becomes a little bit less shiny than it is at the moment. Well, it sounds like maybe then supercomputer is almost like it denotes more purpose than capacity. Because if it was capacity alone, then every big tech company in America would have multiple supercomputers. But it's a question of like, what are you using that computing power for? And it sounds like he's going to rent it out to researchers, to private industry, to kind of try to crack big problems.

36:58which feels different than just like we're just going to try to you know generate some creepy ai character who insults you at a moment you know the drop of a hat for example what's a better use i don't know should we do a poll should we do an elon poll but the question is is like could i rent it out what if i have an idea like our yeah you i think that's that actually you know when i spoke to one of the researchers there, he said it really does democratize access to these GPUs because anyone can apply and you can actually start running your modeling, whatever you're going to do from your phone.

37:35Wow. It's a remote access. So it really does open up some doors for some people who would never have had access to a GPU. So that is quite nice. That is cool. Let's not mock that, shall we? No, no, no. And I think that is genuinely cool. And I think that's, I think that would actually be an amazing source of stories if you could just have like insight into like what this thing is being used for and also what the requests are because you'd probably have completely off the wall ideas you'd have some really niche things but it sounds like they're gonna have a whole universe of kind of really interesting things running on those chips but yeah number 11 today tomorrow it could be number 100 but in a sense who cares when it gets to the point of just like putting this in the hands of more people more organizations more researchers yeah and we're sort of back in the game and we were at 47 or 49 on the list it just shows you how quickly you can drop down right right right well look i think that is it a gallop through all things tech this week and um i must say i i've enjoyed it thank you mark for for coming on i hope it wasn't too painful of an experience for you kind of standing in for katie Well, it was pretty tough listening to you get abused as being pale and bald.

38:52But, you know. I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you for that sympathy. I'll be professional all the way through. Thanks a lot. And we will be back next week still talking about AI, I am sure. But this time, how it may affect the world of law. Spoiler alert. We're going to need less lawyers. but until then thank you for listening and we'll talk to you very soon thank you mark