Live data from Hacker News

The tiny corp raised $5.1M

geohot.github.io

141–150 of 331 posts

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#141
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 wor…

Also in person is a good filter if you are getting too many applications, which I am sure this will assuming the pay is good (but those $100 bounties implies maybe not - anyone who could do those in say 15 minutes would be worth more than $400/h)

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#142

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…

You're creating a false narrative man. Him creating tinygrad makes sense given he created a self-driving car company which leverages deep learning (and now uses tinygrad in prod, go figure). It's not like he decided to hop from self-driving cars to 'AI' because fads changed.

The same self-driving company he left? His "Amazing Journey" post[1] for Comma was illuminating; once a company is "[...] no longer a race car, [but] a boat" GeoHot is likely to bounce. I like AMD as much as the next guy, but I don't want to rely the software being provided by a personality who only really gets excited by working on new projects before the "wild success" stage (if we can call it that for Comma)

1. https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2022/10/29/the-...

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#143
post #51
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

It wouldn't surprise if those 5M came from AMD

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#144
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…

> selling $15k servers that are $10k in parts Have you seen what a DGXA100 costs? It starts at $199k for 8 40GB A100's, which have a list price of $10k each. So the GPU costs are $80k. What do you get for the extra $120k? 1TB ram, 2 2TB NVMe OS drives, 4 4TB NVME general storage, and 8x200Gbit infiniband. I would guess no more than 20k all of the remaining hardware. So that's a ~$100k computer selling for $200k. And…

I agree the DGXA100 is a "complete solution" because it's NVIDIA selling NVIDIA customized integrated/certified/tested/supported hardware and software.

NVIDIA's advantage is that they're a proprietary company and they're the ones actually making the chips they're putting in a box.

That's very far away from a random little open source startup slapping third-party GPUs in a generic box.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#145
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.

[deleted]

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#146
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…

From Twitter

Remote work is available to everyone on GitHub. If you submit a bunch of good PRs and show me you are easy to work with, I'm down to pay per project.

Source https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/166153013618397184...

I'm not anti remote, I'm anti full time remote. It's hard to build a culture

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#147

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…

comma hasn't "fizzled out", it's in active development and drives me to work.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#148

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…

This is the George Hotz MO: I trust him to create a lot less than I trust him to optimize, and I trust him with optimization only in a very narrow technical sense. "Optimizing" Twitter by reducing headcount to 50, regardless of the social or revenue consequences, is actually stupid. Optimizing a whole mess of software that exists between your tensor and the hardware is a decent idea.
Post reply on HN