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The tiny corp raised $5.1M

geohot.github.io

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Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#51

Post by vruiz »

aeyes wrote: post #42
vruiz wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which would make total sense for AMD if they pull it off.

Why would they buy something that is open source? They could acqui-hire but Hotz doesn't strike me as a person that would stay at a big corp like AMD for a significant amount of time.

To control it. If they are successful at making AMD cards competitive in AI, and I agree that what's missing it's only the software, that would create immense value for AMD. Too much to not have control over how it evolves. If they are successful it will not just be Hotz, he will hire other devs and an entire community will form around it.

Sure they could just fork it and try to continue development themselves, but the community and momentum might very well not go with them.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#52

Post by paxys »

csense wrote: post #33

I respect Geohot's reputation and this company looks amazing. I might be in the market to work there... except "No Remote." For such a smart guy, locking yourself out of a ton of talent by requiring software developers to be on-site in 2023 seems...out of character, to put it politely. (Rephrased, my original post was a bit too ad hominem and accumulating downvotes rapidly. I wanted to delete this entire comment but…

Software is part of it, sure, but I doubt anyone can realistically work on this project/company without being around a bunch of specialized hardware and iterating on prototypes. Hard to contribute to any of that from home.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#53

Post by lbhdc »

tzhenghao wrote: post #34
thatguyknows wrote: post #24

I was always surprised at how AMD hasn't already thrown a bunch of money at this problem. Maybe they have and are just incompetent in this area. My prediction is AMD is already working on this internally, except more oriented around PyTorch not Hotz's Tinygrad, which I doubt will get much traction.

I think AMD is going down a different path, ie. ROCm then partnering with ML frameworks further up the stack for first class support. https://pytorch.org/blog/pytorch-for-amd-rocm-platform-now-a...

He mentioned ROCm, and apparently had lack luster experience with it.

>The software is called ROCm, it’s open source, and supposedly it works with PyTorch. Though I’ve tried 3 times in the last couple years to build it, and every time it didn’t build out of the box, I struggled to fix it, got it built, and it either segfaulted or returned the wrong answer. In comparison, I have probably built CUDA PyTorch 10 times and never had a single issue.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#54

Post by btown »

aeyes wrote: post #42
vruiz wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which would make total sense for AMD if they pull it off.

Why would they buy something that is open source? They could acqui-hire but Hotz doesn't strike me as a person that would stay at a big corp like AMD for a significant amount of time.

If/when tinygrad is successful then AMD acquiring control of the stewardship/direction-setting of the software that drives the incremental demand for their hardware is far more valuable than Hotz's talent itself.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#55

Post by SXX »

thatguyknows wrote: post #24

I was always surprised at how AMD hasn't already thrown a bunch of money at this problem. Maybe they have and are just incompetent in this area. My prediction is AMD is already working on this internally, except more oriented around PyTorch not Hotz's Tinygrad, which I doubt will get much traction.

AMD is limited by numerous patent and other legal issues. For this reason small company that releases everything as open source have some chances to beat AMD on their own hardware.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#56

Post by tzhenghao »

lbhdc wrote: post #53
tzhenghao wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think AMD is going down a different path, ie. ROCm then partnering with ML frameworks further up the stack for first class support. https://pytorch.org/blog/pytorch-for-amd-rocm-platform-now-a...

He mentioned ROCm, and apparently had lack luster experience with it. >The software is called ROCm, it’s open source, and supposedly it works with PyTorch. Though I’ve tried 3 times in the last couple years to build it, and every time it didn’t build out of the box, I struggled to fix it, got it built, and it either segfaulted or returned the wrong answer. In comparison, I have probably built CUDA PyTorch 10 times an…

Not surprising lol. This was also the experience I had while experimenting with MLIR approximately 3 years ago. You'd need to git checkout a very specific commit and then even change some flags in code to have a successful build. I'm sure things are better now but I haven't messed with it since then.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#57

Post by wmf »

godelski wrote: post #46

> There’s a [Radeon RX 7900 XTX 24GB] already on the market. For $999, you get a 123 TFLOP card with 24 GB of 960 GB/s RAM. This is the best FLOPS per dollar today, and yet…nobody in ML uses it. > I promise it’s better than the chip you taped out! It has 58B transistors on TSMC N5, and it’s like the 20th generation chip made by the company, 3rd in this series. Why are you so arrogant that you think you can make a bet…

It's often less work to start from scratch than to fix an extremely complex broken stack. Of course people also say this when they just want to start from scratch.

RDNA 3 has dual-issue that basically isn't used by the compiler so half the FPUs are idle.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#58

Post by Shekelphile »

staunch wrote: post #22
Mistletoe wrote: post #8

Can anyone comment on the TinyBox they are taking preorders for? The tinybox 738 FP16 TFLOPS 144 GB GPU RAM 5.76 TB/s RAM bandwidth 30 GB/s model load bandwidth (big llama loads in around 4 seconds) AMD EPYC CPU 1600W (one 120V outlet) Runs 65B FP16 LLaMA out of the box (using tinygrad, subject to software development risks) $15,000

I like George's style and wish him well. But I'm not optimistic about their chances of selling $15k servers that are $10k in parts (or whatever the exact numbers are). It's just too easy for anyone to throw together a Supermicro machine with 6x GPUs in it, which is what it sounds like they'll be doing. My guess is they'll end up creating some premium extensions to the software and selling that to make money. Or maybe…

> It's just too easy for anyone to throw together a Supermicro machine with 6x GPUs in it, which is what it sounds like they'll be doing.

HPC compute is well advanced past just slapping GPUs into generic supermicro servers anyway. Without semi-custom hardware and equivalents to nvlink/nvswitch AMD won't ever be competitive in the HPC space.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#59

Post by wmf »

Animats wrote: post #49
staunch wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like George's style and wish him well. But I'm not optimistic about their chances of selling $15k servers that are $10k in parts (or whatever the exact numbers are). It's just too easy for anyone to throw together a Supermicro machine with 6x GPUs in it, which is what it sounds like they'll be doing. My guess is they'll end up creating some premium extensions to the software and selling that to make money. Or maybe…

> And maybe the box will sell well initially just as a "dev kit" type thing. Price: $15,000. If they had a "lite" model that sold for $1500, and were actually shipping... .

The lite model is any gaming PC with a 7900 XTX.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#60

Post by evanchisholm »

guraf wrote: post #45
1letterunixname wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason no one uses ATI GPUs in datacenters. Their dev support is shit. Don't waste your money. Buy 6 RTX 4090's and a decent ECC-memory server, and call it a day.

I thought you weren't allowed to use Nvidia's consumer GPUs in the datacenter?

You aren't, but who's going to stop you?
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