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Jeff Dean responds to EDA industry about AlphaChip

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Re: Jeff Dean responds to EDA industry about AlphaChip

#131

Post by mi_lk »

fxtentacle wrote: post #125
segmondy wrote: post #117

It's ridiculous how expensive the wrong hire can be https://www.wired.com/story/google-brain-ai-researcher-fired...

It seems that Chatterjee - the bad guy in your linked article - is now suing Google because he thinks he got canned for pointing out that his boss - Jeff Dean mentioned in the article discussed here - was knowingly publishing fraudulent claims. "To be clear, we do NOT have evidence to believe that RL outperforms academic state-of—art and strongest commercial macro placers. The comparisons for the latter were done so…

Clearly there's a huge difference between

1. preventing bad things

2. preventing bad in a way that all junior members on the receiving end feel bullied

So judging from the article alone, it's either suppressing good results and 2. above, both of which are not valuable in my book

Re: Jeff Dean responds to EDA industry about AlphaChip

#132

Post by jiveturkey »

fxtentacle wrote: post #125
segmondy wrote: post #117

It's ridiculous how expensive the wrong hire can be https://www.wired.com/story/google-brain-ai-researcher-fired...

It seems that Chatterjee - the bad guy in your linked article - is now suing Google because he thinks he got canned for pointing out that his boss - Jeff Dean mentioned in the article discussed here - was knowingly publishing fraudulent claims. "To be clear, we do NOT have evidence to believe that RL outperforms academic state-of—art and strongest commercial macro placers. The comparisons for the latter were done so…

case was settled in may 2024

Re: Jeff Dean responds to EDA industry about AlphaChip

#134

Post by gabegobblegoldi »

mi_lk wrote: post #131
fxtentacle wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that Chatterjee - the bad guy in your linked article - is now suing Google because he thinks he got canned for pointing out that his boss - Jeff Dean mentioned in the article discussed here - was knowingly publishing fraudulent claims. "To be clear, we do NOT have evidence to believe that RL outperforms academic state-of—art and strongest commercial macro placers. The comparisons for the latter were done so…

Clearly there's a huge difference between 1. preventing bad things 2. preventing bad in a way that all junior members on the receiving end feel bullied So judging from the article alone, it's either suppressing good results and 2. above, both of which are not valuable in my book

The court case provides more details. Looks like the junior researchers and Jeff Dean teamed up and bullied Chatterjee and his team to prevent the fraud from being exposed. IIRC the NYT reported at the time that Chatterjee was fired within an hour of disclosing that he was going to report Jeff Dean to the Alphabet Board for misconduct.

Re: Jeff Dean responds to EDA industry about AlphaChip

#135

Post by gabegobblegoldi »

Keyframe wrote: post #129

At this point in time, why wouldn't we give at least benefit of the doubt to Jeff Dean immediately? His track record is second to none, and he's still going strong. Has something happened that cast a shadow on him? Sometimes it is the messenger that brings in the weight.

Looks like he aligned himself with the wrong folks here. He is a system builder at heart but not an expert in chip design or EDA. And also not really an ML researcher. Some would say he got taken for a ride by a young charismatic grifter and is now in too deep to back out. His focus on this project didn’t help with his case at Google. They moved all the important stuff away from him and gave it to Demis last year and left him with an honorary title. Quite sad really for someone of his accomplishments.

Re: Jeff Dean responds to EDA industry about AlphaChip

#136

Post by nemonemo »

vighneshiyer wrote: post #121
nemonemo wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UCSD paper says "We thank ... colleagues at Cadence and Synopsys for policy changes that permit our methods and results to be reproducible and sharable in the open, toward advancement of research in the field." This suggests that there may have been policies restricting publication prior to this work. It would be intriguing to see if future research on AlphaChip could receive a similar endorsement or support from…

Cadence in particular has been quite receptive to allowing academics and researchers to benchmark new algorithms against their tools. They have also been quite permissive with letting people publish TCL scripts for their tools ( https://github.com/TILOS-AI-Institute/MacroPlacement/tree/ma... ) that in theory should enable precise reproduction of results. From my knowledge, Cadence has been very permissive from 2022 o…

We're not just talking about academia—Google's AlphaChip has the potential to disrupt the balance of the EDA industry's duopoly. It seems unlikely that Google could easily secure the policy or license changes necessary to publish direct comparisons in this context.

If publicizing comparisons of CMPs is as permissible as you suggest, have you seen a publication that directly compares a Cadence macro placement tool with a Synopsys tool? If I were the technically superior party, I’d be eager to showcase the fairest possible comparison, complete with transparent benchmarks and tools. In the CPU design space, we often see standardized benchmarking tools like SPEC microbenchmarks and gaming benchmarks. (And IMO that's part of why AMD could disrupt the PC market.) Does the EDA ecosystem support a similarly open culture of benchmarking for commercial tools?

Re: Jeff Dean responds to EDA industry about AlphaChip

#137

Post by alsodumb »

gabegobblegoldi wrote: post #135
Keyframe wrote: post #129

At this point in time, why wouldn't we give at least benefit of the doubt to Jeff Dean immediately? His track record is second to none, and he's still going strong. Has something happened that cast a shadow on him? Sometimes it is the messenger that brings in the weight.

Looks like he aligned himself with the wrong folks here. He is a system builder at heart but not an expert in chip design or EDA. And also not really an ML researcher. Some would say he got taken for a ride by a young charismatic grifter and is now in too deep to back out. His focus on this project didn’t help with his case at Google. They moved all the important stuff away from him and gave it to Demis last year and…

I mean Jeff Dean is probably more ML researcher than probably 90% of the ML researchers out there. Sure, he may not be working on state of the art stuff himself; but he's too up the chain to do that.

Re: Jeff Dean responds to EDA industry about AlphaChip

#138

Post by sanxiyn »

xpe wrote: post #37
11101010001100 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their material discovery paper turned out to have negligible significance.

If so, does this qualify as “snake oil”? What do you mean? Snake oil requires exaggeration and deception. Fair? If a paper / experiment is done with intellectual honesty, great! If it doesn’t make a big splash, fine.

I think the paper was probably done honestly, but also very poorly. They claimed synthesis of 36 new materials. When reviewed, for 24/36 "the predicted structure has ordered cations but there is no evidence for order, and a known, disordered version of the compound exists". In fact, with other errors, 36/36 claims were doubtful. This reflects badly for authors and worse for peer review process of Nature.

https://x.com/Robert_Palgrave/status/1744383962913394758

Re: Jeff Dean responds to EDA industry about AlphaChip

#139

Post by alsodumb »

choppaface wrote: post #47
pclmulqdq wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason Jeff Dean cares is that his team's improvement compared to standard EDA tools was marginal at best and may have overfitted to a certain class of chips. Thus, he is defending his research because it is not widely accepted. Open source code has been out for years and in that time the EDA companies have largely done their own ML-based approaches that do not match his. He attributes this not to failings in his…

The result is minor AND Google spent a (relative) lot of money to achieve it (especially in the eyes of the new CFO). Jeff Dean is desperately trying to save the prestige of the research (in a very insular, Google-y way) because he wants to save the 2017-era economically-not-viable blue sky culture where Tensorflow & the TPU flourished and the transformer was born. But the reality is that Google’s core businesses are…

What makes you say TPU has zero chance against growing NVIDIA?

If anything, now is the best time for TPU to grow and I'd say investing in TPU gave Google an edge. There is no other large scale LLM that was trained on anything but NVIDIA GPUs. Gemini is the only exception. Every big company is scrambling to make their own hardware in the AI era while Google already has it.

Everyone I know who worked with TPUs loves how well they scale. Sure Jax has a learning curve but it's not a problem, especially given the performance advantages it gives.

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