The entire article that thread references never mentions any hardware, at all, only their software platform. The "Watchdog" referred to in the (editorialized?) title is literally never mentioned, and it is not really a piece of "hardware", it is a piece of _software_ called "Sentry" that (clarified in the Nvidia blog) they run on Bluefield-4 hardware (the "chip") which is their network card. It only exists in $10mil+ clusters. Just an awful and misleading article and headline, and an awful thread filled with people who know nothing about how hardware works arguing over nothing.

Most of the hardware functionality from a GPU that models need is generic and used every time you use a GPU for any compute. You can implement language models in a GLSL shader; modern GPUs have been programmable for 20 years, that's the point of their existence. The best thing they could do is just literally nerf the consumer hardware substantially to make tokens unusable or stop selling consumer hardware. They don't need spyware to do that. It would also make their products dogshit.

More broadly, "Compute" is basically a resource that our economy relies on to a large degree, it has been that way for decades. And it turns out it's very bad when you just destroy the thing your economy relies on. And doing so doesn't solve problems like "Current computers exist today" or "Other people make computers". So who gives a shit about Jensen? Comments here talking about "taking him out"? What's actually more likely is just that really powerful people today are often corrupt and also really fucking stupid. He played a stupid game and lost.

None of this stuff is putting the current open weights genie back in the bottle IMO. Amodei using RoboStormtrooperGruppen9000 bots and going door to door to take peoples GPUs at gunpoint is a more plausible method of doing so.