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The tiny corp raised $5.1M

geohot.github.io

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Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#231

Post by zamnos »

godelski wrote: post #219
sanxiyn wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tinygrad isn't a big selling point. I'd expect most people to be able to build something similar after watching Karpathy's micrograd tutorial. Tinygrad doesn't mean expertise in ML and it similarly doesn't mean expertise in accelerator programming. I wouldn't expect a front end developer to understand Template Metaprogramming and I wouldn't expect an engineer who programs acoustic simulations to be good at front end.…

> You act like there are actually fullstack developers and not just people who do both poorly.

If you haven't worked with someone who's smarter and more motivated than you are, then I can see how you'd draw that conclusion, but if you have, then you'd know that there are full stack developers out there who do both better than you. It's humbling to code in their repos. I've never worked with geohot so I don't know if he is such a person, but they're out there.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#232

Post by Retric »

bagavi wrote: post #165
thesausageking wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Waymo and Cruise have burnt through money like no one else. They want to make their own cars, thier own Ai chips/lidar, their own self driving tech. Delusional at best, malicious at worst. They made a hard SW problem into hard HW+SW problem. They are zombies unless some magic happens in the world of nn (which is not unlikely tbh) Whereas comma is taking the right approach of a nimble team, iterate fast and ship a wor…

Cruise is part of GM, so saying they are going to make their own cars is hardly delusional.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#233

Post by FrustratedMonky »

threeseed wrote: post #80
vippy wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

George Hotz is a talented engineer but he absolutely does not have the social science background to "fix" Twitter.

Being an engineer at Twitter is much more akin to an enterprise like a bank or telco. You need to be a team player and work across different groups e.g. Product, Testing, SRE etc in order to successfully get features into Production. So being a talented engineer is useful but having high emotional intelligence and being able to negotiate and collaborate is far more important.

I'm surprised more people don't realize this. It happens to all big corp.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#234

Post by ovi256 »

pavlov wrote: post #225
gettodachoppa wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, when Elon Musk took over and gutted half the staff, I distinctly remember HN full out of outrage and predicting (in hindsight, "impotently wishing" would be more accurate) doom and how Twitter will go down any day now. Then nothing happened. At least, nothing that I personally observed as a casual Twitter reader. The goalposts were moved to "it will go down with the New Year's Eve spike", and once again nothing…

Did you see the news about DeSantis yesterday? Musk convinced him to announce his presidential candidacy on Twitter, and the live stream just didn’t work. I don’t think that qualifies as “nothing happened” when features used in high-profile events fail, with the CEO and a potential future president left on the line. Any other platform wouldn’t have struggled with a stream of this size. I guess you might say that’s ju…

> the live stream just didn’t work

Are you sure ? Others say 6.5 M listened to the livestream that was delayed 20 mins

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#236

Post by prepend »

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…

That’s funny, I remember blackra1n and it was pretty clever.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#238

Post by sanxiyn »

mlazos wrote: post #197
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,…

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…

I agree writing something that needs to be compatible with, say, PyTorch is a significant undertaking, but why is that necessary? I also agree some models like MaskRCNN is not static, and people will not change their model code, but I don't think it matters.

Let's say you want to run LLaMA. LLaMA is a tiny amount of code, say, 300 lines. LLaMA is static. It doesn't matter people will implement LLaMA with PyTorch and not tinygrad, geohot can port LLaMA to tinygrad himself. In fact, he already did, it's in tinygrad repository.

What I am saying is while running all models ever invented is harder than running LLaMA and Stable Diffusion (Stable Diffusion port is also in tinygrad repository), that's not necessarily trivializing the problem. It is noticing that you don't need to solve the full problem, there is enough demand for solving the trivial subset.

While developers will choose usability, users will choose cheap price. If they can run what they want on cheaper hardware, they will. I already have seen this happening: people don't buy NVIDIA to run Leela Chess Zero, they just run it on their hardware. It doesn't matter everyone working on LC0 model is using NVIDIA, that's irrelevant to users. LC0 model is fixed and tiny, people already ported the model to OpenCL, OpenCL port is performant, it runs well on AMD. The same will happen to text and image generation models.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#239

Post by Timon3 »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #141
dasil003 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

It's a filter, but what makes it good? I'd expect average applicant quality to go down.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#240

Post by anoonmoose »

ovi256 wrote: post #234
pavlov wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you see the news about DeSantis yesterday? Musk convinced him to announce his presidential candidacy on Twitter, and the live stream just didn’t work. I don’t think that qualifies as “nothing happened” when features used in high-profile events fail, with the CEO and a potential future president left on the line. Any other platform wouldn’t have struggled with a stream of this size. I guess you might say that’s ju…

> the live stream just didn’t work Are you sure ? Others say 6.5 M listened to the livestream that was delayed 20 mins

so was it no longer live, or did they encounter 20 minutes of technical issues that delayed the start? cuz either way it seems pretty obvious that at least for some amount of time it didn't work
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