Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The tiny corp raised $5.1M

geohot.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 331 posts

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#111

Post by foobiekr »

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…

A lot of people have now had the direct experience that new things which are highly technical or highly collaborative are not really compatible with the remote work thing. I know that's hard for a lot of people to hear, but the world is not web apps (which do remote well) and a lot of projects benefit hugely from being able to grab the two or three people and get into a room with a whiteboard.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#112

Post by mastax »

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…

> So why not just fix AMD accelerators in pytorch?

It doesn't fit the business model. I mean sure, they'll sell AMD computers now like a bootleg Puget Systems. But why buy from the bootleg when I can just buy from the real thing (or AWS) and run tinygrad on there if I want?

So the play is, get people using your framework (tinygrad), then pivot to making AI chips for it:

> In the limit, it’s a chip company, but there’s a lot of intermediates along the way.

Seems far fetched but good luck to them.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#113

Post by dasil003 »

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…

Let's be honest here: remote and in-person is a major tradeoff with significant pros and cons on both sides. Remote work increases your talent pool by 5 orders of magnitude and removes commute overhead, but in-person work increases your communication bandwidth and team cohesion in similarly dramatic ways. Hybrid solutions put a hard cap on the upside of either path and therefore tend to give you the worst of both worlds. It makes perfect sense to be opinionated about this, especially at the startup stage. I respect the decisiveness (even though I would be very reluctant to go back to full-time commute).

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#114

Post by foobiekr »

patentatt wrote: post #4

If they can achieve something competitive with CUDA for $5m, why hasn't AMD done it yet?

Every single startup since maybe 1980 that is not borderline criminal has faced at least one incumbent that is better funded and has, frankly, more talent with better experience.

The reason they sometimes win is huge structural or incentive issues in the large companies. And they don't win often.

AMD has failed to fix the problem for years. Is it because the business structure doesn't incentivize it? Is it because the company's entrenched culture is opposed to compensation that might attract the right talent (often out of "fairness")? Is it because there's some internal owner for the function that keeps fucking up but for political reasons the CEO won't replace them and no one else can work on the thing?

Any of these are possible. I have seen - personally witnessed - all of these and more at large companies. We don't know the reason, but we can sort of guess as to the shape of it.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#115

Post by foobiekr »

Shekelphile wrote: post #58
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…

> 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.

SuperMicro has HGX servers. $300k buys you an 8xH100 chassis with crazy amounts of memory, storage, CPU and GPU compute.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#116

Post by nonethewiser »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #102

> 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,…

Can anyone elaborate on how or why Turing completeness requires these sub optimal patterns?

I recall reading about avoiding Turing completeness for similar reasons to avoid the halting problem.

> Other times these programmers apply the rule of least power—they deliberately use a computer language that is not quite fully Turing-complete. Frequently, these are languages that guarantee all subroutines finish, such as Coq.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#117

Post by anonymoushn »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #109
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 thou…

Twitter doesn't work well and isn't accessible so we needn't burden every product change with these additional concerns.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#118

Post by nwienert »

SXX wrote: post #63
nwienert wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotta have money to start to keep taking risks

While it's not available to many of us (and especially those outside of US) it doesn't take that much money to just tinker with whatever you want. Just have to cut time wasted on news and politics, socialising and literally anything outsidie of being hacker or entrepreneur. Most people just would never take that risk and will stick to their well-paying job.

Was it pg who said it? Not sure but basically - middle class get about one shot. Upper class can keep shooting their whole lives. Of course lower class usually doesn’t get one.

I took my one shot! Any more is too risky for quite a while.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#119

Post by Retric »

thesausageking wrote: post #93
normaldist wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comma didn't fizzle out. https://twitter.com/comma_ai/status/1578517666632900608

They're slowing burning through their VC money trying to make a business out of the hobbyist market while Cruise and Waymo have fully autonomous cars deployed in SF and are scaling up.

The scale of investment is wildly different. $5.57M in actual revenue vs $18.1M raised isn’t that far from a viable product and positive ROI for their investors.

Cruse and Waymo have invested billions, they need 10’s of billions in annual sales or their project is a failure.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#120

Post by neom »

threeseed wrote: post #104
dclowd9901 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Waymo removed it's backup drivers years ago...

https://spectrumnews1.com/ap-top-news/2020/10/08/waymo-remov...

https://www.azfamily.com/2022/08/29/waymo-launches-its-self-...

There was also a waymo press released this year that stated all rides in Arizona are now backup driver free, although I can't find it.

Post reply on HN