PWC, a professional-services firm, reckons that AI could add almost $16trn to global economic output by around 2030 (compared with 2017)
Most broadband users in Africa’s most populous country are limited to mobile internet, which is slower still.
But a dearth(부족) of onshore lines to carry data inland will leave much of that capacity wasted.
In some ways Africa’s weak digital infrastructure is explained by the success of its mobile revolution, whereby privately owned telcos entered newly liberalised markets, disrupting and displacing the incumbent(재임중인, 의무의 일부로 필요한)operators. But their jump over landlines is coming back to bite them. In much of the rich world, the basic infrastructure of telephones—junction boxes and telephone poles or underground cable conduits—have been repurposed to provide fast fibre-optic broadband. Yet Africa is often starting from scratch.
The lack of connectivity is compounded by a shortage of the heavy-duty data centres needed to crunch the masses of data required to train large language models and run the AI-powered applications that could boost Africa’s economic growth.
A rack of servers needed for AI can use up to 14 times more electricity than a rack of normal servers.
China’s Huawei, for example, is building 70% of Africa’s 4G networks.
Moreover, much of the internet bandwidth that lands on the coasts is wasted because of a lack of high-capacity overland cables to carry it to the interior.
Benchmarks chart the field’s overall progress and show how AI systems compare with humans at specific tasks. They can also help users decide which model to use for a particular job and identify promising new entrants in the space,
GPUs remain 10-100 times more cost-efficient and up to 1,000 times faster than cpus
When applied to ai, this was not their only advantage over the central processing units (CPUs) used for most applications: they allowed larger batches of training data to be used. They also ate up a lot less energy.
-----
But, says Dr Fourrier, benchmark scores “should be taken with a pinch of salt”. Model-makers are, in effect, marking their own homework—and then using the results to hype their products and talk up their company valuations.
stopgap : 임시방편 temporary solution
incentivise : 인센티브를 주어 장려핟다
entrant : 갓 합류한 사람. 출전
pump-prime : (경제) 활성화시키다 (prime a pump 마중물을 붓다) pump-priming policy : 경기 부양