Needless to say, Fujifilm is citing generative AI and other AI-related services as major drivers behind the growing demand for magnetic tape
LTO-10 tapes were released earlier this year, providing a native capacity of 40 terabytes.
Is $64m even an investment in the context of AI components? That just feels like the price of 64GB of RAM.
I don’t get it, why bother archiving anything AI produces? You can just ask the next AI to reproduce it.
This feels like a brain dead comment.
Why bother archiving anything when a computer can produce it?
Because sometimes it’s faster or cheaper to compute something and store the result then to recompute it every time. Nothing about AI changes that or is special in any way shape or form.
Okay, no need to name call. Tapes are for long term archiving. The access speed is minutes to hours, so these are definitely not for caching.
Archival of everything being scraped before its pushed off the internet and replaced with AI produced garbage.
The ship has sailed on the front. But even if its for the corpus of training data, surely that can’t be stored on tape, the access time would be way too slow.
It’s purpose is archival, not access. Tape density, cost, and reliability is much better than other mediums for that purpose.
Thats exactly my point, why bother archiving when you need it accessible for training? Surely they would be putting the training data on a faster medium.
Because you need a backup.
True in general, but I am not convinced its true for OpenAI or anthropic.
Their training data is probably already replicated across multiple datacenters, so tape archiving is less critical. And if tape archiving is critical, then surely they already have sufficient backups already right? And its not like the organic content of the internet is growing anymore, so there isn’t going to be an explosion of new organic data they need to store.
So I don’t buy that they need this. I think this is fujifilm trying to get in on the bubble, and nothing more.
