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The tiny corp raised $5.1M

geohot.github.io

241–250 of 331 posts

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#241
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…

I think there's a certain type of person, particularly common in tech, who thinks this way about _everything_; "oh, that's way easier than what I do, how hard could it be". A kind of reverse impostor syndrome. See the cryptocurrency space; it's more or less been 15 years worth of crypto people accidentally repeating all the failures of conventional finance from the last couple of centuries, because, after all, how hard could it be?

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#242

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…

For reference, comma released a new version of openpilot today, and we now sell comma threes. https://blog.comma.ai/092release/

Tres commas: https://youtu.be/2XxwhMcUjYU?

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#243
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is quite thoroughly studied in mathematics, and that particular issue has a definitive answer.

It does not. Logical outcomes that use infinity as an intermediary are inherently not reliable. An example of this is the Ramanujan summation where 1+2+3+... results in -1/12, an outcome which is disputed among mathematicians due to the fact that we have not defined the concept of infinity properly.

What does it have to do with cardinality of continuum, with several proofs since Cantor?

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#245
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…

[flagged]

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#246

> 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. Agree with this insight. One thing Nvidia got right was a focus on software. They introduced CUDA [1] back in 2007 when the full set of use cases for it…

I know the founders of an AI chip company that taped out and got working chips on their first go. They got their chip done, it’s pretty solid. Chip has great perf and is super power efficient, a solid delivery. I knew they'd nail it and they did. The SW story is a train wreck, though. The problem basically was that they couldn’t hire any good SW people. As I said I know the founders. They are both genuinely decent gu…

were the SW folks offered compensation commensurate with their low perceived status? like HW gets C/cofounder, SW gets early employee package. Because that's a different story about money and ownership. of course good people reject wage labor.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#247
post #38

Good idea. I don't think George Hotz has the skill set to actually deliver on a lot of this stuff (specifically I suspect trying to replace the compiler for the GPU is something that he will probably make a song and dance about with some simple prototype but then quietly scrap it because even for AI workloads its still a very very tricky problem) but he has the strength of vision to get and direct other people to do…

do you think those talented workers will accept giving him ownership over that work and its value?

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#248
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a very happy user of Comma, I think it is reasonable to say the company is going to fail, but that ignores that the product they created is still awesome. Comma is light years better than any built-in driving assist in any non-Tesla car. And it's comparable to Tesla for far less money. I'm Comma user in one of my cars as well, and I do like it. But, when was last time you tried built-in driving assist in a Tesla…

I've logged a lot of miles of Comma in a 2023 Hyundai Ioniq and 2022 Toyota Prius Prime, and the built in driving assist of both cars is nowhere near Comma, both in terms of steering and accelerator/brake. Things that Comma handles seamlessly that the built-in cruise in both cars will not: - Full stop and go - Sharp turns on the highway that require slowing down (both built-in adaptive cruise modes will gladly just d…

> - Not requiring me to touch the steering wheel every 20 seconds

In many countries doing this will void your insurance.

> - Sharp turns on the highway that require slowing down (both built-in adaptive cruise modes will gladly just drive you off a cliff at 65 mph)

While it's probably given that this will happen, it's also an infrastructural failure. Just place a limited speed limit sign way before the sharp turn, or fix the road so it doesn't make a sharp turn.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#249
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think there's a certain type of person, particularly common in tech, who thinks this way about _everything_; "oh, that's way easier than what I do, how hard could it be". A kind of reverse impostor syndrome. See the cryptocurrency space; it's more or less been 15 years worth of crypto people accidentally repeating all the failures of conventional finance from the last couple of centuries, because, after all, how ha…

You hit the nail on the head. There are definitely these kinds of people and they are definitely highly concentrated in tech.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Modular and OctoML are building on top of MLIR and TVM respectively. > It's pretty hard to really beat NVIDIA for developer support though, they've invested a lot of work into the CUDA ecosystem over the years and it shows. Yup, strong CUDA community and dev support. That said, more ergonomic domain specific languages like Mojo might finally give CUDA some competition though - it's still a very high bar for sur…

There's also OpenAI Triton. People seem to miss that OpenAI is not using CUDA...

Yeah, also see AMD engineers working on Triton support here: https://github.com/openai/triton/issues/46
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