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The tiny corp raised $5.1M

geohot.github.io

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Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#191
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Obscurity is only a viable form of security until the patent holder becomes aware of you.

Patents holder might be aware of you, but they still go into legal battles for money.

AMD have a lot of money to lose.

George Hotz $5M OSS company - well, not so much.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#192

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…

[deleted]

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#194

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

What is the cost of an equivalent setup using A100s? I have no idea what I am doing but here goes! By [1] we have 156 FP16 TFLOPS, taking their non "*" (* = with sparsity) value. So you need 5 So $40,000? pls the other stuff, and someone to make a profit putting it together say $50,000? So this setup is 3 times cheaper for the same. If I am allowed to use the sparsity value it is 1.5 times cheaper. [1] https://www.nv…

A100s have a much worse performance per dollar than 3090s/4090s (which are the direct competitors to the 7900x)

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#195
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So why not just fix AMD accelerators in pytorch? Both ROCm and pytorch are open sourced. Isn't the point of the OSS community to use the community to solve problems? Because there's no real evidence that AMD cares about this problem, and without them caring your efforts may well be replaced by whatever AMD does next in the space. Their Brooks language[1] is abandoned, OpenCL doesn't compare well, ROCm is like the S…

> This is geohot. He knows how to build software, and how to fix problems. This is a nonsequitor. This feels like when my uncle learns that I know how to program he asks me to build a website. These are two different things. I do ML and scientific computing, I'm not your guy. Hotz is a wiz kid but why should we expect his talents to be universal? Generalists don't exist. And we're talking the guy who tweeted about be…

geohot wrote tinygrad. This is not about believing his skills to translate to other domains. It is his domain.

You definitely shouldn't trust what geohot says about infinitary mathematics or (god forbids) quantum mechanics. On the other hand, you generally should trust what he says about machine learning software stack.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#196

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…

Why is Twitter such a Waterloo for all these obviously accomplished people?

It seems like they've been assuming Twitter is the way it is because it was staffed by technically incompetent leftists, and if only they could apply their own get-things-done attitude and "neutral" politics, then the problem would be trivially fixable.

Where does this fallacy come from? Is it because of the illusory simplicity of the tweet format? Something like: "We just need to come up with the right algorithm and do an embarrassingly parallel run over these tiny 280-character chunks of text. How hard can that be. In my own Very Serious Day Job, I deal with oompabytes of very complex data. This tweet processing stuff should be child's play in comparison."

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#197

> 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,…

This 95% of models are statically computable thing really shows how much he is trivializing this problem. I’d be interested to see his SW stack compile MaskRCNN. His ISA is massively under-defined and people will not change their model code to run on this accelerator unless his performance beats cuda significantly and even then they still won’t - usability matters more than performance every time. In the end you need a compiler, and it needs to be compatible with an existing framework which is not trivial at all, since they are written in python.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Some light, coffee reading "Cardinality of the continuum" [1]: in short, the cardinality of real numbers (ℝ) is often called the cardinality of the continuum, and denoted by 𝔠 or 2^ℵ_0 or ℶ_1 (beth-one [2); whereas, interestingly [3], the cardinality of the integers (ℤ) is the same as the cardinality of the natural numbers (ℕ) and is ℵ_0 (aleph-null) [perhaps what was meant initially?].

Related: the Schröder–Bernstein theorem [4], "if there exist injective functions f : A → B and g : B → A between the sets A and B, then there exists a bijective function h : A → B.".

Not related, but great: Max Cooper (sound) and Martin Krzywinski (visuals) did a splendid job visualising "ℵ_2" [5].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinality_of_the_continuum

[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E2%84%B6

[3] "Cardinalities and Bijections - Showing the Natural Numbers and the Integers are the same size", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuJwmvW96Zs

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6der%E2%80%93Bernstei...

[5] "Max Cooper - Aleph 2 (Official Video by Martin Krzywinski)", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNYfqklRehM

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#199
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why is Twitter such a Waterloo for all these obviously accomplished people? It seems like they've been assuming Twitter is the way it is because it was staffed by technically incompetent leftists, and if only they could apply their own get-things-done attitude and "neutral" politics, then the problem would be trivially fixable. Where does this fallacy come from? Is it because of the illusory simplicity of the tweet f…

It's because of scale.

Very complicated algorithms and mathematical proofs can still be understood by a single person, and be explored by a small number of people who all know each other. Brain surgery is done by a small team of people. These are typical "smart people" occupations.

Something as simple as Twitter still needs machinery that spans across technical skills, needs 24 hour monitoring, and needs lawyer and accountant support, so nobody can actually to it.

People think they can do it, because it's easy to spin up a demo that sends messages to a few thousand people and then shut it down again. They don't think about how to scan for CSAM, or how to respond to foreign government censorship requests.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#200

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…

agree. he was talking about how he can do this and that to fix Twitter then just fizzled, blame the Twitter's code and said Twitter need to rewrite from the ground up.
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