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Five Years of Tinygrad

geohot.github.io

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Re: Five Years of Tinygrad

#21

Post by georgehotz »

ttul wrote: post #18
still-learning wrote: post #16

>People get hired by contributing to the repo. It’s a very self directed job, with one meeting a week and a goal of making tinygrad better I find this organizational structure compelling, probably the closest to reaching 100% productivity in a week as you can get.

I wonder what happened to George’s old policy of requiring everyone to move to San Diego?

That's comma.ai's policy since they make hardware and solve physical problems. The tiny corp has been hybrid (remote-first) since day 1 because it primarily writes open source software, and there's a long track record of success with remote for this kind of task.

We have a few whole-team meetups in Hong Kong each year for 2-4 weeks, and there's a San Diego or Hong Kong office that anyone can work from as they choose. We also have a wide array of fancy multi GPU boxes that everyone on the team gets full access to (known external contributors can get some access also).

I think many companies that were quick to embrace remote have walked it back, not everyone is capable of working productively remotely, nor are all types of work amenable to remote.

Re: Five Years of Tinygrad

#22

Post by dewey »

paxys wrote: post #6

Lots of words and weird analogies to say basically nothing. What is the status of the project? What can it do? What has it achieved in 5 years? But no, let's highlight how we follow the "Elon process". As a side note, whenever someone incessantly focuses on lines of code as a metric (in either direction), I immediately start to take them less seriously.

Using lines of code as a metric for productivity is bad. Using it to show how simple something is, or how a refactor removed x lines of code that doesn’t need to be maintained any more isn’t such a bad thing I’d say.

Re: Five Years of Tinygrad

#24

Post by whilenot-dev »

dewey wrote: post #22
paxys wrote: post #6

Lots of words and weird analogies to say basically nothing. What is the status of the project? What can it do? What has it achieved in 5 years? But no, let's highlight how we follow the "Elon process". As a side note, whenever someone incessantly focuses on lines of code as a metric (in either direction), I immediately start to take them less seriously.

Using lines of code as a metric for productivity is bad. Using it to show how simple something is, or how a refactor removed x lines of code that doesn’t need to be maintained any more isn’t such a bad thing I’d say.

TFA includes a time measurement though, and 5 years for 18'935 SLOC doesn't scream quite "how simple something is".

Re: Five Years of Tinygrad

#25

Post by alphazard »

dewey wrote: post #22
paxys wrote: post #6

Lots of words and weird analogies to say basically nothing. What is the status of the project? What can it do? What has it achieved in 5 years? But no, let's highlight how we follow the "Elon process". As a side note, whenever someone incessantly focuses on lines of code as a metric (in either direction), I immediately start to take them less seriously.

Using lines of code as a metric for productivity is bad. Using it to show how simple something is, or how a refactor removed x lines of code that doesn’t need to be maintained any more isn’t such a bad thing I’d say.

Yeah this is exactly right, if you can trust the contributors to not code-golf or otherwise Goodhart the LoC metric, then it's a reasonable measure of complexity.

It doesn't work as well when you start mixing languages, or generating code.

Re: Five Years of Tinygrad

#26

Post by alphazard »

> To fund the operation, we have a computer sales division that makes about $2M revenue a year.

What's the margin on that? Do 5 software engineers really subsist on the spread from moving $2M/yr in hardware?

Re: Five Years of Tinygrad

#28

Post by alphazard »

measurablefunc wrote: post #19

Is it really "Complex"? Or did we just make it "Complicated"? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY

Programming a GPU in 2025 is complex, that might be because it has been made complicated, but regardless, it is not complexity that this project can control.

The fact that it competes with PyTorch in so few lines speaks to the incredibly low incidental complexity imposed by Tinygrad.

Re: Five Years of Tinygrad

#30

Post by piskov »

alphazard wrote: post #26

> To fund the operation, we have a computer sales division that makes about $2M revenue a year. What's the margin on that? Do 5 software engineers really subsist on the spread from moving $2M/yr in hardware?

George raised $5.1M in 2023 for Tinygrad
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