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Cerebras’ new monster AI chip adds 1.4T transistors

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Re: Cerebras’ new monster AI chip adds 1.4T transistors

#91

I’m bearish on new hardware for AI training. The most important thing is the software stack, and thus far everyone has failed to support pytorch in a drop-in way. The philosophy here seems to be “if we build it, they’ll buy it.” But suppose you wanted to train a gpt model with this specialized hardware. That means you’re looking at two months of R&D minimum to get everything rewritten, running, tested, trained, and w…

So we are looking for OpenCUDA for AI. Like OpenGL in the 90s.

Re: Cerebras’ new monster AI chip adds 1.4T transistors

#92

What does the programming model look like for one of these (like at the assembly level)? I’m not even sure what to google.

The article states that the programming model is TensorFlow or PyTorch. However, I'm not clear on the details of customizing TensorFlow or PyTorch code to run efficiently on this chip.

Re: Cerebras’ new monster AI chip adds 1.4T transistors

#94

I’m bearish on new hardware for AI training. The most important thing is the software stack, and thus far everyone has failed to support pytorch in a drop-in way. The philosophy here seems to be “if we build it, they’ll buy it.” But suppose you wanted to train a gpt model with this specialized hardware. That means you’re looking at two months of R&D minimum to get everything rewritten, running, tested, trained, and w…

> The philosophy here seems to be “if we build it, they’ll buy it.” Supposedly Cerebras is already profitable, so it's hardly a situation where they are building something and hoping people buy it eventually. > That means you’re looking at two months of R&D minimum to get everything rewritten, running, tested, trained, and with an inferencing pipeline to generate samples. Again, based on the companies representations…

I’ve learned to be skeptical of such claims. TPUs made that same claim, but it’s hard to use it for real work, since you don’t have access to the 300GB TPU host memory / cpu, where you infeed training examples.

There is a very specific test for “supports pytorch / tendorflow”: show an MLPerf imagenet resnet benchmark. It’s impossible to fake that. If you come anywhere close to TPUs in tensorflow, people (like me) will leap: https://mlcommons.org/en/training-normal-06/

Till then, it’s a “proof, please” type of situation.

Re: Cerebras’ new monster AI chip adds 1.4T transistors

#95
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe people will get to their senses and switch to Julia instead of having to waste all these time on Python bindings.

Python here basically works as a binder for C, which is what everything is written in.

That is in fact the problem, yes.

Re: Cerebras’ new monster AI chip adds 1.4T transistors

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because you made a false analogy. AI isn't literally "the future". Billions of $ are being invested in deep-learning focused AI right now (which you call "the future"), and yes it could be a bubble and it could burst. You can disagree, but it's still a sensible thing to predict.

By bursting you mean humanity will never create artificial intelligence? Or you mean that there will be a cool off period as for example what happened with quantum physics at some point? Because it sure looks to me that there is no future without AI regardless of cool off periods. That makes my statement true. If you think humanity will never progress from where we are now then we pretty much are on very opposite sch…

I agree with you, but I also think that the current wave of investment is in fact a bubble that will burst. See, I truly believe that AI will be an important part of our future. What you call a cool off, I call a bubble burst, which it is when the cool off involves investors losing tons of money they bet on deep learning.

Re: Cerebras’ new monster AI chip adds 1.4T transistors

#97

I’m bearish on new hardware for AI training. The most important thing is the software stack, and thus far everyone has failed to support pytorch in a drop-in way. The philosophy here seems to be “if we build it, they’ll buy it.” But suppose you wanted to train a gpt model with this specialized hardware. That means you’re looking at two months of R&D minimum to get everything rewritten, running, tested, trained, and w…

I think apple expects you to use pretrained models and convert them to CoreML.

There is also webGPU which is experimental on Safari and Chrome. But that doesn’t touch the ML accelerators on the M1.

Re: Cerebras’ new monster AI chip adds 1.4T transistors

#98

I’m bearish on new hardware for AI training. The most important thing is the software stack, and thus far everyone has failed to support pytorch in a drop-in way. The philosophy here seems to be “if we build it, they’ll buy it.” But suppose you wanted to train a gpt model with this specialized hardware. That means you’re looking at two months of R&D minimum to get everything rewritten, running, tested, trained, and w…

You're bearish on new hardware for AI training because it takes 2 months to setup? That's like saying you're bearish on the invention of transistor because there are no computers yet. This chip is for research organizations such as LLNL and ANL. Tooling and commoditization will happen.

> “if we build it, they’ll buy it.”

This is literally how any new thing is invented and commercialized.

Re: Cerebras’ new monster AI chip adds 1.4T transistors

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s straightforward to do a head to head comparison. from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yso2S2Svdlg @ 25:14 James Wang: "If a model doesn’t fit into a GPU’s HBM, is it smaller when it’s laid out in the Cerebras way relative to your 18 gigabytes?" Andrew Feldman: "It is — it’s smaller in that we hold different things in memory than they do. One can imagine a model that has more parameters than we can…

Are there any good resources out there describing in practice how existing training workloads are distributed among GPUs? (using tensorflow, pytorch, or whatever else?). I'm curious how the problem effectively gets sliced.

SOTA on the biggest language models (which is where effectively the largest models are) is here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/zero-infinity-...
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