The Thirty Percent Confession

Salesforce published a research paper acknowledging that approximately 30% of AI tasks do not require expensive GPU-based processing, contradicting the industry's prevailing assumption that all AI workloads demand high-cost silicon. The enterprise software giant's own findings suggest that much of what is marketed as advanced AI is actually simpler lookup operations that could run on cheaper hardware.

Last time I told you the AI industry is paying a tax it doesn’t have to pay — that a great deal of what we grandly call “AI” is really just looking things up, and we’ve chosen to do that looking-up on the most expensive silicon ever manufactured. A number of you wrote to say I was overstating it. Surely, you said, the people setting hundreds of billions of dollars on fire know something I don’t. So this week I won’t argue with you. I’ll let one of the largest companies in enterprise software argue with you instead — because it already has, in a research paper it published itself and seems to have hoped you wouldn’t read too closely. The company is Salesforce. … The post