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The tiny corp raised $5.1M

geohot.github.io

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Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#161

Post by lostmsu »

Scarbutt wrote: post #135
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just had my AMD-based machine crash - repeatedly - every time I tried to use Google Maps inside Firefox for longer than a few minutes. I haven't confirmed, but I strongly assume that either their graphics drivers or something Ubuntu does with Wayland are not fine.

To be fair, you have group the perfect combo for initiating a crash, a google product inside firefox inside linux desktop on wayland.

Of these only Linux kernel is the thing that can take down the whole machine.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#162

Post by nl »

godelski wrote: post #156
nl wrote: 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…

> Hotz is a wiz kid but why should we expect his talents to be universal?

No of course not. But this is literally his field of expertise, and there's plenty of reasons to think he knows what he is doing. Specifically, the combination of reverse engineering and writing ML libraries means I'd certainly expect he's had reasonable experience compiling things.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#163

Post by sammywater »

thesausageking wrote: post #93
normaldist wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comma didn't fizzle out. https://twitter.com/comma_ai/status/1578517666632900608

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.

So what? Dont the vast majority of companies that take VC funds.. burn through it before generating profit?

George is courageous, inspiring, and highly intelligent. He stands for what he believes in. He stands up for himself and his beliefs, and talks back to powerful people.

How many tries did it take to invent scalable electricity, or the light bulb?

George Hotz is frikkin awesome

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#164

Post by ergocoder »

stefan_ wrote: post #76
neom wrote: post #6

Seems like a much better mission for George Hotz to go on than single handedly trying to fix Twitter.

I thought he was doing AI self-driving. I see we are now moving the goalposts to "generalized intelligence" so I suppose there was no point for him to put up with just cars anymore.

Reading with the term "moving goalposts" leaves a really bad impression.

It is like it is wrong to stop working on one idea and start working on the other.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#165

Post by bagavi »

thesausageking wrote: post #93
normaldist wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comma didn't fizzle out. https://twitter.com/comma_ai/status/1578517666632900608

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 working product (even if not L4-5), get cash flow, next milestone.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#166

Post by birken »

justapassenger wrote: post #153
birken wrote: post #127

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. The reason the company might fail is because their main thesis, being that car manufacturers would just license the self driving t…

> 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 drive you off a cliff at 65 mph)

- Situations where the lane lines are hard to see or are implied

- Non-highway driving

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

Maybe those things work in higher end cars (though I'd say the Ioniq is a fairly high-end car), but then again with Comma you get it for ~$2k in a ton of cars instead of having to buy a luxury car.

It is true that if you are on a highway, with clear lane lines, the steering assist in both cars is certainly a lot better than nothing, but it's just not nearly matching the reliability and versatility of Comma in any sort of imperfect situation.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#167

Post by djd20 »

georgehotz wrote: post #160
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…

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

Congrats! Just read up on thr taco bell drive. Great achievment! https://blog.comma.ai/taco-bell/

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#168

Post by nibles_and_bits »

godelski wrote: post #46

> There’s a [Radeon RX 7900 XTX 24GB] already on the market. For $999, you get a 123 TFLOP card with 24 GB of 960 GB/s RAM. This is the best FLOPS per dollar today, and yet…nobody in ML uses it. > I promise it’s better than the chip you taped out! It has 58B transistors on TSMC N5, and it’s like the 20th generation chip made by the company, 3rd in this series. Why are you so arrogant that you think you can make a bet…

Intel Arc A770 16gb $349 had 40 TFLOP of FP16 which is close to 7900 xtx on the FLOPS/$ scale.

Intel's software is much better (MKL, vtune, etc for GPU) and getting better.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#169

Post by krick »

godelski wrote: post #158
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #109

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…

For me it was when he said that the cardinality of integers is the same as real numbers. Then I saw his twitter and all the politics and crazy stuff about QM.

> the cardinality of integers is the same as real numbers

That's definitely more outrageous than saying that frontend is trivial. Whatever, I never took him seriously anyway.

Re: The tiny corp raised $5.1M

#170

Post by smasher164 »

Turing-completeness != un-optimizable! Literally the areas of type systems and compilers exist to serve this endeavor. It's gotta be a meme at this point every time someone brings up the halting problem or rice's theorem.
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