Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Their closed source driver?
The tiny corp raised $5.1M
171–180 of 331 posts
Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M
#172Earlier 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.
I don't mind bit of skepticism. But let's see: Comma is actually used by people in their cars to achieve some degree of self driving. He actually shipped something that works! The idea is ambitious as well as commercially interesting: car manufacturers don't reinvent wheel for every component but rely on OEMs to help them out. This was a similar bet. That way it is wildly more successful than hundreds of other undifferentiated yet another social/lending/flavour of the season apps.
It takes guts to put out such bold bets in writing. We've seen many (senior!) tech people sneer at George's at times naive optimism. I actually find the "how hard could be" attitude refreshing against "no no it is complicated you can't do that" gatekeeping. Because otherwise we will end up using big-tech for lack of alternative. It is not the critic who counts and all that..
Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me it was when he said that the cardinality of integers is the same as real numbers. Then I saw his twitter and all the politics and crazy stuff about QM.
> the cardinality of integers is the same as real numbers That's definitely more outrageous than saying that frontend is trivial. Whatever, I never took him seriously anyway.
Isn't that just a trivial misunderstanding of Hilbert's Hotel?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_paradox_of_the_Gra...
Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M
#174Turing-completeness != un-optimizable! Literally the areas of type systems and compilers exist to serve this endeavor. It's gotta be a meme at this point every time someone brings up the halting problem or rice's theorem.
CS education considered harmful!
Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M
#175> 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 Co…
It isn’t that there are suboptimal patterns, it’s just the more expressive your language can be at runtime, the less you can reason about statically. An example is data-dependent control flow. If you can’t reason about what branch your code is going to take statically (without your runtime data) it is harder to generate fast code for it.
Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M
#176For 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…
Some of the highlights from the Twitter saga:
1. Soliciting others to do his work - and offering internships to others that can help, in a kind of internship MLM (He was an intern at the time).
2. Complaining about how Twitter doesn't run on his laptop
Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M
#177For 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…
Did comma actually tank? I was under the impression that they actually had a good product and were really honest about it too.
Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M
#178For 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…
I don’t remember that he said it was easy, I read some of his tweets and listened (twice) to the twitter space he did with elon and the big take away for me was that he was convinced twitter wouldn’t be able to move much without a heavy refactor. I can believe that. Elon who disagreed with him at the time seemed to have changed his mind now.
Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the cardinality of integers is the same as real numbers That's definitely more outrageous than saying that frontend is trivial. Whatever, I never took him seriously anyway.
Isn't that just a trivial misunderstanding of Hilbert's Hotel? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_paradox_of_the_Gra...
Either he's: Trying to be edgy for edgy's sake or he bragging about how he's smarter than the experts in the field while demonstrating a lack of understanding (thinking he doesn't have to prove it to others, they should just trust him). Neither give me that great of an opinion of him. If you don't understand something don't tell everyone that studies the thing that they're wrong. If the experts are wrong, show them, embarrass them, get a fields metal, another million dollars, and a shit ton of fame. Essentially, pony up or shut up.
Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M
#180AMD only enabled their ROCm stack on consumer cards last month. This finally corrects a huge mistake - Nvidia made cuda available on all their cards for free from the start and made it easy/cheap for people to get started. Of course once they'd started they stuck with it... I hope it's not too late to turn this around.