Quantum #50
Issue #50 of the weekly HPC newsletter by HMx Labs. GenAI in financial markets, HPC Club, the utility of quantum and I even talk about Bitcoin.
HPC Club this week! Promises to be fun. I don’t know how I’m going to make the time to speak to all the people I want to speak that are attending 😱
AWS have a really interesting blog this week on the use of generative AI to test financial models. As much as I criticise GenAI, particularly all the insanity and hype around it replacing humans, I think this is a fantastic use case. Many, many years ago in the early days of automated bond trading I remember working on systems to automate hedging as well as simple market execution. Some of the most interesting conversations were with traders discussing how to handle various market scenarios. GenAI to simulate players in the market would have been a real boon back then.
With companies like Simudyne working with banks and regulators to test models perhaps we can find model weaknesses before yield curves actually invert, we get negative interest rates or “black swans” events occur. Wow. I said something positive about GenAI. I think I better go and lie down.
Lastly, I have been highly impressed with the quality of candidates we have had for our junior HPC engineer role. I don’t know if this is a reflection of the poor state of the market and we therefore have people applying that would otherwise be aiming at more senior roles or bigger brands? Or if we have upped our game enough to appear to be an attractive place to work?
In The News
Updates from the big three clouds on all things HPC.
This seems like pretty bad news for anyone running VMWare (yes, yes I know you don’t run HPC on VMs… except that lots of people do, even on-prem on hardware they own and control… don’t get me started..)
The Stack
Putting aside, for a minute, the utility (or rather lack thereof) of Bitcoin, it’s an interesting history to study to try and predict where we go in the future for GPUs for AI. Bitcoin mining was heavily GPU driven in its early days and a major factor for increases in GPU prices and sales. Till it wasn’t. The world moved to ASICs. Will we see a similar shift in the AI space? The hyperscalers are certainly pushing in that direction:
Timothy Prickett Morgan
Quantum has seen a lot of hype recently with announcements from Google, Microsoft and AWS. This is fairly down to earth take on things though for a change. Worth reading just because it states:
“Therefore, if one defines value strictly as the ability to solve currently unsolvable problems, quantum computing’s value remains limited at this point.”
staff
From HMx Labs
We still don’t have a charter or even a short and snappy definition of what the aims of HPC Club are but if you want to read a rambling piece about why we do I’ve got you covered!
Not like that! Have a bit of mechanical sympathy please! Yes, even with your code
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