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The tiny corp raised $5.1M

geohot.github.io

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Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#101

Post by xpose2000 »

thesausageking wrote: post #88

For background, "geohot", is George Hotz, who's a known hacker / tech personality[0] This project fits the pattern of his previous projects: he gets excited about the currently hot thing in tech, makes his own knockoff version, generates a ton of buzz in the tech press for it, and then it fizzles out because he doesn't have the resources or attention span to actually make something at that scale. In 2016, Tesla and s…

To me this is fair criticism. I was thinking the same thing. However, the world does need a viable competitor to Nvidia in AI.

AI is not going anywhere. This is not a fad like some of the others mentioned but more likely than not where the next decade of innovation is built on.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#102

Post by SkyMarshal »

> I think the only way to start an AI chip company is to start with the software. The computing in ML is not general purpose computing. 95% of models in use today (including LLMs and image generation) have all their compute and memory accesses statically computable.

> Unfortunately, this advantage is thrown away the minute you have something like CUDA in your stack. Once you are calling in to Turing complete kernels, you can no longer reason about their behavior. You fall back to caching, warp scheduling, and branch prediction.

> tinygrad is a simple framework with a PyTorch like frontend that will take you all the way to the hardware, without allowing terrible Turing completeness to creep in.

I like his thinking here, constraining the software to something less than Turing complete so as to minimize complexity and maximize performance. I hope this approach succeeds as he anticipates.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#103

Post by foobiekr »

impulser_ wrote: post #68

Why wouldn't AMD throw a few million at this? Worst case they lose a small amount of money, but best case they finally get good software for their hardware. The past decade or so, they haven't been able to create any good software for their hardware. They made small improvements but the competition, Nvidia, has also made improvements to their already good software. It too the point where their software is the reason…

AMD can't be bothered. They've had literally years to fix the SW issue that allows Nvidia to stomp them in the space quarter after quarter with no fix in sight.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#104

Post by threeseed »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #83
stefan_ wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought he was doing AI self-driving. I see we are now moving the goalposts to "generalized intelligence" so I suppose there was no point for him to put up with just cars anymore.

I’m not convinced ai driving can even work without GAI. Seems like a logical next step to the gigantic yak shave that is autonomous driving.

Both Cruise and Waymo have human backup in case of unexpected edge cases.

I suspect they are going to be needed for quite some time to come.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#105

Post by mattnewton »

chubs wrote: post #98

He claims there's a $999 AMD card that gives 123 TFLOPS, and his tinybox will cost $15k for 738 TFLOPS. In other words, the tinybox will have 6 of these GPUs, eg $6000 cost price. It seems a steep markup from 6k to 15k, and if the software is open-source, i'm not sure why you wouldn't build your own? Or is it worth 9k for a custom motherboard that can fit so many GPUs. Or can you buy 6-GPU motherboards off the shelf?…

As someone who has built their own deep learning rigs in the $10k BoM range, frankly it's a pain in the ass and I would gladly pay that in the future. I probably will pay lambdalabs a much larger markup.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#106

Post by reaperman »

agnosticmantis wrote: post #94

> The human brain has about 20 PFLOPS of compute. Where is this number coming from? The number of spikes per second? Edit: doing a quick search, it doesn’t seem like there’s a consensus on the order of magnitude of this. Here’s a summary of various estimates: https://aiimpacts.org/brain-performance-in-flops/

No idea. I don't think there's any scientific consensus on even an upper limit of a human brain's FLOP equivalence.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#107

Post by zdw »

chubs wrote: post #98

He claims there's a $999 AMD card that gives 123 TFLOPS, and his tinybox will cost $15k for 738 TFLOPS. In other words, the tinybox will have 6 of these GPUs, eg $6000 cost price. It seems a steep markup from 6k to 15k, and if the software is open-source, i'm not sure why you wouldn't build your own? Or is it worth 9k for a custom motherboard that can fit so many GPUs. Or can you buy 6-GPU motherboards off the shelf?…

Logic boards and CPUs with the necessary PCIe lanes capable of feeding the GPUs, storage fast enough to do the 30GB/s that is in the spec sheet, power supplies and a case to hold such a power hungry system, etc. is not cheap.

$15k seems like a kind of low - if you've tried to spec out a server with similar quantities of accelerators recently, you'd have trouble hitting that figure, even if using consumer grade GPUs.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#109

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

thesausageking wrote: post #88

For background, "geohot", is George Hotz, who's a known hacker / tech personality[0] This project fits the pattern of his previous projects: he gets excited about the currently hot thing in tech, makes his own knockoff version, generates a ton of buzz in the tech press for it, and then it fizzles out because he doesn't have the resources or attention span to actually make something at that scale. In 2016, Tesla and s…

My opinion of geohot definitely dropped after he started tweeting how easy it would be to fix Twitter, and then he started soliciting free work. He obviously underestimated the difficulty of shipping a feature across web and mobile. Hacking a prototype is trivial. Making it work well for all platforms, fully accessible, and across all supported languages is a bigger hurdle. It just gave me the impression that he thought frontend development was trivial and he'd just be able to hack it out in a day.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#110

Post by AlotOfReading »

chubs wrote: post #98

He claims there's a $999 AMD card that gives 123 TFLOPS, and his tinybox will cost $15k for 738 TFLOPS. In other words, the tinybox will have 6 of these GPUs, eg $6000 cost price. It seems a steep markup from 6k to 15k, and if the software is open-source, i'm not sure why you wouldn't build your own? Or is it worth 9k for a custom motherboard that can fit so many GPUs. Or can you buy 6-GPU motherboards off the shelf?…

You can buy 6+ gpu motherboards, but the consumer ones are solely for mining because no normal person has that many cards and no consumer CPU exposes enough lanes to properly support that many GPUs. A lot of enterprise vendors exist to sell you that kind of system in the enterprise space, but you should expect to still be paying 5 figures minimum. $15k seems like the low end to me.
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