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Groq press release: https://groq.com/newsroom/groq-and-nvidia-enter-non-exclusiv... > Today, Groq announced that it has entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Nvidia for Groq’s inference technology. The agreement reflects a shared focus on expanding access to high-performance, low cost inference. > As part of this agreement, Jonathan Ross, Groq’s Founder, Sunny Madra, Groq’s President, and other member…
I got curious about how many wheelbarrows of cash $20bn actually is. Two ways to think about it: weight vs volume. By weight (assuming all $100 bills): $20,000,000,000 / $100 = 200,000,000 bills Each bill is roughly 1g, so total mass is ~200,000 kg A typical builder’s wheelbarrow can take about 100 kg before it becomes unmanageable 200,000 kg total / 100 kg per wheelbarrow ≈ 2,000 wheelbarrows (weight limit) By volum…
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Indeed, as justincormack comments: ”It is not structured as an outright acquisition to avoid US Gov't anti trust scrutiny, but effectively it probably is”. “Non-exclusive” ? Ummmm, yeah, right, sure. You can probably bet there is an private understanding that Groq will no longer offer it's “top of the line” best technology to competitors of Nvidia. Some may see this as a clever, “slight of the hand” attempt for Nvidi…
What generated this comment?
Groq press release: https://groq.com/newsroom/groq-and-nvidia-enter-non-exclusiv... > Today, Groq announced that it has entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Nvidia for Groq’s inference technology. The agreement reflects a shared focus on expanding access to high-performance, low cost inference. > As part of this agreement, Jonathan Ross, Groq’s Founder, Sunny Madra, Groq’s President, and other member…
A really strange agreement where top executives of a company "join" another company for the benefit of the other company.
If it quacks like a duck...
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Groq doesn't have any employees. They can't do R&D because there's no one to do it. The $20B goes to Groq's investors.
From the article: > Groq added that it will continue as an “independent company,” led by finance chief Simon Edwards as CEO. The $20B does not go to Groq's investors. It goes to Groq. You can say that Groq is owned by its investors, and this is the same thing, but it's not. In order for the money to go to the investors, Groq needs to disburse a dividend, or to buy back shares. There is no indication that this will ha…
Given that Groq is basically the TPU spin out Google should have done years ago it shows what a valuable asset TPUs are in Google. Still this they should spin that out though!
Groq is very different from TPUs. The difference in memory should be a big clue. (Groq using SRAM built into each compute unit, vs TPUs using HBM more similarly to GPUs)
> Prior to founding Groq, Jonathan began what became Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) as a 20% project where he designed and implemented the core elements of the first generation TPU chip.
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NVIDIA release some of the best open source models around. Almost all open source models are trained and mostly run on NVIDIA hardware. Open source is great for NVIDIA. They want more open source, not less. Commoditize your complement is business 101.
Then why are they spending $20 billion dollars to handicap an inference company that giving open source models a major advantage over closed source models?
Your words.
Because it's very good tech for inference?
It doesn't even do training.
And most inference providers for Open Source models use NVIDIA eg Fireworks, Basten, TogetherAI etc.
Most NVIDIA sales go to training clusters. That is changing but it'd be an interesting strategy to differentiate the training and inference lines.
Biggest surprise for me is that they chose to announce this on Christmas Eve. I’d love to have been in the room when that was decided. The big, exciting news doesn’t typically get announced during a major holiday week.
They want the Trump Jr. and Chamath connections to be forgotten by the time the media and YouTubers get active again after New Year. It's a standard media tactic.
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They want the Trump Jr. and Chamath connections to be forgotten by the time the media and YouTubers get active again after New Year. It's a standard media tactic.
Honestly, it's basically an accepted fact that the best thing to do is just to never respond anything that media/people say. If you respond, the conversation will continue. If you just say nothing, they'll move on to the next topic, because everyone needs to keep their audience engaged. With no response, your audience isn't interested either, so you have to move onto something else.
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NVIDIA release some of the best open source models around. Almost all open source models are trained and mostly run on NVIDIA hardware. Open source is great for NVIDIA. They want more open source, not less. Commoditize your complement is business 101.
Then why are they spending $20 billion dollars to handicap an inference company that giving open source models a major advantage over closed source models?
I would guess their interconnect technology is what NVIDIA wants. You need something like 75 adapters for an 8b parameter model they had some really interesting tech to make the accelerator to accelerator communication work and scale. They were able to do that well before nvl 72 and they scale to hundreds of adapters since large models require more adapters still.
We will know in a few months.