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Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

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Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

#171
post #93

I was always fascinated by George Hotz's hacking abilities. Inspired me a lot for my personal projects.

I agree. It is fascinating. When you observe his development process (btw, it is worth noting his generosity in sharing it like he does) he gets frequently stuck on random shallow problems which a perhaps more knowledgable engineer would find less difficult. It is frequent to see him writing really bad code, or even wrong code. The whole twitter chapter is a good example. Yet, himself, alone just iterating resilientl…

This matches my own take. I've tuned into a few of his streams and watched VODs on YouTube. I am consistently underwhelmed by his actual engineering abilities. He is that particular kind of engineer that constantly shits on other peoples code or on the general state of programming yet his actual code is often horrendous. He will literally call someone out for some code in Tinygrad that he has trouble with and then he will go on a tangent to attempt to rewrite it. He will use the most blatant and terrible hacks only to find himself out of his depth and reverting back to the original version.

But his streams last 4 hours or more. And he just keeps grinding and grinding and grinding. What the man lacks in raw intellectual power he makes up for (and more) in persistence and resilience. As long as he is making even the tiniest progress he just doesn't give up until he forces the computer to do whatever it is he wants it to do. He also has no boundaries on where his investigations take him. Driver code, OS code, platform code, framework code, etc.

I definitely couldn't work with him (or work for him) since I cannot stand people who degrade the work of others while themselves turning in sub-par work as if their own shit didn't stink. But I begrudgingly admire his tenacity, his single minded focus, and the results that his belligerent approach help him to obtain.

Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

#172
post #80

Incredible! I'd been wondering if this was possible. Now the only thing standing in the way of my 4x4090 rig for local LLMs is finding time to build it. With tensor parallelism, this will be both massively cheaper and faster for inference than a H100 SXM. I still don't understand why they went with 6 GPUs for the tinybox. Many things will only function well with 4 or 8 GPUs. It seems like the worst of both worlds now…

A macbook is cheaper though

4x32GB(128GB) DDR4 is ~$250. 4x48GB(192GB) DDR5 is ~$600. Those are even cheaper than upgrade options for Macs($1k).

Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

#173
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it baffling that ideas like "govern compute" are even taken seriously. What the hell has happened to the ideals of freedom?! Does the government own us or something?

> I find it baffling that ideas like "govern compute" are even taken seriously. It's not entirely unreasonable if one truly believes that AI technologies are as dangerous as nuclear weapons. It's a big "if", but it appears that many people across the political spectrum are starting to truly believe it. If one accepts this assumption, then the question simply becomes "how" instead of "why". Depending on one's politica…

AI is very different from nuclear weapons because a state can't really use nuclear weapons to oppress its own people, but it absolutely can with AI, so for the average human "only the government controls AI" is much more dangerous than "only the government controls nukes".

Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

#175
post #98
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it baffling that ideas like "govern compute" are even taken seriously. What the hell has happened to the ideals of freedom?! Does the government own us or something?

If AI is actually capable of fulfilling all the capabilities suggested by people who believe in the singularity, it has far more capacity for harm than nuclear weapons. I think most people who are strongly pro-AI/pro-acceleration - or, at any rate, not anti-AI - believe that either (A) there is no control problem (B) it will be solved (C) AI won't become independent and agentic (i.e. it won't face evolutionary pressu…

>If you hold the opposite opinions, then it makes perfect sense to push the brakes as hard as possible, which is why "govern compute" can make sense as an idea.

The people pushing for "govern compute" are not pushing for "limit everyone's compute", they're pushing for "limit everyone's compute except us". Even if you believe there's going to be AGI, surely it's better to have distributed AGI than to have AGI only in the hands of the elites.

Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

#176
post #86

Is this one of those features that's disabled on consumer cards for market segmentation?

Sort of. An imperfect analogy: a small neighborhood of ~15 houses is under construction. Normally it might have a 200kva transformer sitting at the corner, which provides appropriate power from the grid. But there is a transformer shortage, so the contractor installs a commercial grade 1250kva transformer. It can power many more houses than required, so it's operating way under capacity. One day, a resident decides h…

Where is the hack in this analogy

Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

#177
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have export restrictions on cryptography. Of course there will be AI regulations.

You need to abandon your apocalyptic worldview keep up with the times my friend. Encryption export controls have been systematically dismantled to the point that they're practically non-existent, especially over the last three years. Pretty much the only encryption products you need permission to export are those specifically designed for integration into military communications networks, like Digital Subscriber Voic…

Are you on drugs or is your reading comprehension that poor?

1) I did not state a world view; I simply noted that restrictions for software do exist, and will for AI, as well. As the link from the other commenter show, they do in fact already exist.

2) Look up the definition of "apocalyptic", software restrictions are not within its bounds.

3) How the restrictions are enforced were not a subject in my comment.

4) We're not pals, so you can drop the "friend", just stick to the subject at hand.

Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this the same guy that hacked the PS3?

He has a very checkered history with "hacking" things. He tends to build heavily on the work of others, then use it to shamelessly self-promote, often to the massive detriment of the original authors. His PS3 work was based almost completely on a presentation given by fail0verflow at CCC. His subsequent self-promotion grandstanding world tour led to Sony suing both him and fail0verflow, an outcome they were specifica…

[flagged]

Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

#179
post #10

If we end up with a compute governance model of AI control [1], this sort of thing could get your door kicked in by the CEA (Compute Enforcement Agency). [1] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ai-safety-fundamentals...

You mean the Turing Police [1] [1] https://williamgibson.fandom.com/wiki/Turing_Police

Ah, and then do we get the Butlerian Jihad?

https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad

Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find it baffling that ideas like "govern compute" are even taken seriously. It's not entirely unreasonable if one truly believes that AI technologies are as dangerous as nuclear weapons. It's a big "if", but it appears that many people across the political spectrum are starting to truly believe it. If one accepts this assumption, then the question simply becomes "how" instead of "why". Depending on one's politica…

AI is very different from nuclear weapons because a state can't really use nuclear weapons to oppress its own people, but it absolutely can with AI, so for the average human "only the government controls AI" is much more dangerous than "only the government controls nukes".

But that makes such rules more likely, not less.
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