Why? They have no idea how many users they will get. If they buy A100s on the assumption they will get 50M daily active users they run the risk of wasting an enormous amount of money if they get 1M users instead. And its not like these GPUs grow on trees. Clearly MSFT is struggling to set up compute fast enough, see the decreasing rate limits on GPT-4.
> Clearly MSFT is struggling to set up compute fast enough, see the decreasing rate limits on GPT-4.
Well, even so, this is how you'd deal with capacity problems, rather than by arbitrarily shutting out parts of the world.
In order to not geo-block, Google would need to be able to scale infinitely? What kind of straw man is this?
> there was a shortage of memory chips, which required a lot of creativity.
Geo-blocking doesn't strike me as particularly creative as far as solutions go. Whatever problem they're trying to address, the excuses being made here seem weak and don't make Google look any less incompetent.
Not sure about incompetence, it's just a very hard problem. Sam Altman's estimations for ChatGPT were off by 10x, for reference. Apparently some employees thought it would be a total flop that would barely make the last page of major newspapers.
> You're also saying Google, _a cloud computing provider selling access to A100s_, can't scale this dynamically?
I'm saying that Google can not acquire enormous quantities of A100s overnight, yes.
If that's the problem then they're not supplying the right fix. Surely restricting this to users located in the US doesn't prevent people from writing in a language that isn't English. Google should be capable of detecting the language of a query, and potentially rejecting it based on that with an apology.
> PR,
Obviously there must be _some_ reason why they're doing this. Doesn't mean it's a good reason.
> scaling, not enough capacity for the new users.
That would be rather embarrassing for Google.