Jane Street has shown the interior of its Texas AI training data center containing 4,032 GPUs across 56 racks linked by 8,000 km of fiber with liquid cooling

It was very fun to hear Ron tell the stories of early Jane Street.

Their first cluster was a pile of 6 Dell boxes in their office.

And it was important to them that it be physically in their office so that if something went haywire, they could just physically unplug the machine.

Goes without saying that they can no longer fit their 100s of k of GPUs in their office.

Smart move of Jane Street to ditch the cloud and improve profits by 0.0000001 bps

This is interesting just on the merits and also “This is a segment that makes no sense to any broadcaster on any economical model in history of television, and yet makes excellent sense for all participants here.”

“Why doesn’t it make sense to broadcasters?”

Because you can’t broadcast to an audience that profoundly cares about data center water cooling engineering optimization. All the incentives are “Make it more accessible! Make it less concrete! Connect it to broader narratives!”

(That lecture included the memorable instruction, paraphrased, "There are multiple types of fire suppression systems in our physical environments and some will not kill you during ordinary operation. Important to understand what type of room you are in at *all times.*")

I must admit that my first thought upon seeing this video was… “did Jane Street hire an interior designer for their data centers and if so, who?”

But I still love the cloud.

Probably one of the best “talent brand” artifacts on Internet in last two decades and I’m not 100% sure that is the primary point either.

probably a pretty big misread of the value of controllable uptime, compute security, and latency, i think. they use the gpus for fast inference too. latency expensive

@PrannayKhosla Well they had a very visible stand at ICLR while Anthopic was nowhere to be found

@PrannayKhosla Probably just growing the company? It's hard to impossible to keep the same talent bar while growing, so something has to change about the recruiting.

(Some people do heat management professionally, he mentions for the benefit of readers who have never contemplated that specific question before.)

(It is also extremely tuned for accessibility but not the sort of accessibility that 60 Minutes cares about, FWIW. In particular you can follow it without ever having done heat management professionally. That is not, I think, an accident.)

("Have you?" Near the minimum possible for a systems engineer. I got the How To Not Die After Pushing The Big Red Button lecture precisely once and have not been in a dense computing environment since except via command line.)

@GoshawkTrades Imagine having the best infrastructure, top mathematicians, thousands of GPUs and near unlimited capital…

…and still ending up accused of manipulating markets across commodities, crypto and even Indian markets.

@GoshawkTrades Retail traders after watching Jane Street’s setup:

Yeah but my RSI divergence strategy still works bro😭

@yminsky @dwarkesh_sp This is awesome! 💪

@GoshawkTrades The most sophisticated trading firm on the planet kept their systems in the open because they were too scared to lose sight of them. A janitor with a vacuum fixed that real quick.

@GoshawkTrades If you are wondering how trading systems can go wrong, I highly recommend the below

(B/c I lived it)

@ANSR42 @GoshawkTrades They produce liquidity. Someone wants to buy at price X, and someone else wants to sell at price Y, and they make that transaction happen sooner than it otherwise would.

This is a measurable service they produce. You and I are not buyers of this service, but others are.