Who is the dork? Are we supposed to know him/her?
Jim Keller moves to AI chip startup
31–40 of 94 posts
Re: Jim Keller moves to AI chip startup
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
10000x at least. Whole staffed departments at rivals can't bring to market what he did repeatedly.
Nobody does that stuff alone. I think a more accurate description would be that he seems to be a force multiplier for the team he leads, which can have a bigger impact than any singular engineering feat.
He's a great football coach that's also a great player.
Re: Jim Keller moves to AI chip startup
#33Has anybody on HN worked with him and could say a little bit more about his individual contributions and management style?
Re: Jim Keller moves to AI chip startup
#34I often find it hard to believe that a single person can make much of a difference in such intricate problem domains as chip design but in his case the evidence is overwhelming. Also goes to show what a shit show Intel has become since even he was not able to right that ship. I think in the CPU space it will be all ARM and RISC ten years from now and since Intel never really managed to become a dominant player in any…
It is hard to believe. However out of my own experience: Execution, decision making, vision and goals, people, alignment, setbacks. A very complex mixture and the more people there are, the more important a driver is. PS: Nice nickname. Read the book from Th. Mann - over a period of 7 years I think.
Goethe’s was always my favourite rendition (ignoring pt2). Just enough romance and woe
Re: Jim Keller moves to AI chip startup
#35> The chips also operate on the assumption that future software will involve programmers giving high-level directions while artificially intelligent computers write much of the nitty gritty code required to implement those human ideas. I can't wait to stop writing machine code.
It'll turn more like trying to teach someone to do a trick, with all the misunderstandings and frustrations to boot. Mind you, that same thing is now done to software devs, that is, product manager tries to explain what they want, designers and devs interpret in a certain way.
Exactly this. Maybe after Neuralink we'll get there. Maybe, because there's still a human on one end who doesn't know what they really want or need.
Re: Jim Keller moves to AI chip startup
#36Jim is a tour de force: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA
Had no idea this man was so prolific, and Lex had interviewed him. I'm sure it'll be a very interesting interview.
Thanks for the link!
Re: Jim Keller moves to AI chip startup
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have a Hot Chips presentation on YouTube with a lot more detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLjumOyWj0g I don't notice anything in particular that stands out vs. the many other AI chips people are making, at first glance. But I'm far from an expert. There are several other technical videos on their YouTube channel as well: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7041p6DlAh0r4_Fnlk10pQ
Thanks for these! My assumption is that hiring Keller means they plan to gain advantage by world class execution rather than some crazy architectural leap of faith.
Also Jim was almost certainly the one doing the interviewing, so there’s likely something interesting in there that he felt was worth his time.
Re: Jim Keller moves to AI chip startup
#38Has anybody on HN worked with him and could say a little bit more about his individual contributions and management style?
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Re: Jim Keller moves to AI chip startup
#39I often find it hard to believe that a single person can make much of a difference in such intricate problem domains as chip design but in his case the evidence is overwhelming. Also goes to show what a shit show Intel has become since even he was not able to right that ship. I think in the CPU space it will be all ARM and RISC ten years from now and since Intel never really managed to become a dominant player in any…
Honest question, are we sure he didn't make a difference? Dude usually shows up, does the work with the team, leaves.. only year, two or plus we see the results.
There's a very big delay between finalizing a design and actually etching said design in silicon, and bringing a design to silicon of course involves a lot of non-trivial work. This is kind of why Intel had the whole tick-tock thing, as whilst the current design is being put into silicon, the design team can work on the next iteration of the design.Also why AMD could be very confident about their next Zen iteration being a lot faster when they were releasing Zen 2.
Re: Jim Keller moves to AI chip startup
#40I often find it hard to believe that a single person can make much of a difference in such intricate problem domains as chip design but in his case the evidence is overwhelming. Also goes to show what a shit show Intel has become since even he was not able to right that ship. I think in the CPU space it will be all ARM and RISC ten years from now and since Intel never really managed to become a dominant player in any…
Keller was involved with the GPU initiative at Intel, I believe. He certainly wasn't there to fix the process node deadlock.