Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't agree. At the moment companies like NVIDIA take several times what it costs to make a chip. I think the fair split for the technology contribution is more like 50-50, maybe even 30-70 in favour of the manufacturer. With competition we will actually have the fair split, whatever that is, and thus much lower prices. At the moment, to have a big AI firm, or really AI firm at all, you need to be blessed by NVIDIA…
10-90 is the fair split.
OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell
331–340 of 390 posts
Re: OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell
#332The article is a bit naive: > However, as previously mentioned, Jalapeño’s results are obtained without speculative decoding and Vera Rubin’s results use speculative decoding. Speculative decoding leads to a ~3-5x reduction in cost per token. When speculative decoding is implemented on Jalapeño, this will enable Jalapeño to serve tokens even more cost effectively. How much speculative decoding improves throughput is…
In the slides on twitter you can see Jalapeno CAN do speculative decoding. In fact they explicitly mention how compute is disaggregated 3 ways now: prefill, predict, decode, and how a huge Jalapeno advantage is that it uses dark sillicon to switch between these without having to move the KV cache which remains local.
Re: OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell
#333This semi-analysis article reads a lot more like an OpenAI press release than a real analysis. And to be honest some of the statements seem like just straight up lies - they initially claim they were invited to benchmark it, and then half way down switch to claiming that OpenAI provided all the numbers. This really kind of sucks, because I want to read actual detailed nuanced and credible analysis of what's happening…
Re: OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell
#334If you make an inference only chip, you better be damn sure that it's significantly better than Nvidia's GPUs at it.
Otherwise, it's better to buy Nvidia' GPUs because they're more flexible. You can do a big training run, then use them for inference right after.
Re: OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell
#335Re: OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree, I remember when even half precision made its way into C# sometime around 2020 (I didn’t know much about ML then) and I thought, well I guess that’s a worthwhile tradeoff but I can’t imagine going lower. Lo and behold (1-bit Bonsai) how much lower you could go.
Ternary?
Re: OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which in turn reminds me of Soundblaster audio cards! I suspect inference chips are closer to the GPU story than the Soundblaster story though. I remember one soundblaster card I bought came with a Lara Croft demo, that exploited the incredible immersion of real time dynamic reverb. Genuinely I think game audio took a few steps back from that heady era, the innovation in audio likely didn't sell as many cards as grap…
EAX was very powerful in its heyday, but it has died because of a thousand cuts. First we had to have the audio processor. Good EAX was available on top of the line cards, and they were not always cheap. Lower end chips got less features. Then we had to have the speaker setup to have the greatest sound, or needed to get a real 5.1 headphones, which were bulky and never provided the same fidelity. Then Microsoft chang…
Re: OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
The metal masked ROM is basically only 2 metal/contact layers. It's not a full new design and tapeout. You could roll a new set of parameters every ~2-3months. It's not an architectural change. See statements below. https://www.eetimes.com/taalas-specializes-to-extremes-for-e... https://www.turingpost.com/p/taalas https://cambrian-ai.com/taalas-launches-hardcore-chip-with-i... Part of the key is that by moving even f…
But that means your different chips all have different sets of weights and are different generations. If none of that is baked into the chip as now then all the chips are running the latest weights every time. Even if you could ignore the stuff built into the chip when the time came, at that point you just wasted money on silicon that’s useless in 2-3 months.
A 6 months old model that can run at 1/10th hardware and much faster too, can be much more capable than a sota model when you don't have unlimited budget.
Re: OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell
#339I hope the LLM wave will leave GPUs behind to go back to pursue more general-purpose computation rather than spending their die area on multiplying 4-bit-number matrices and such things.
Is that not literally the exect opposite of the direction asics for LLM inference is going?
Re: OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the slides on twitter you can see Jalapeno CAN do speculative decoding. In fact they explicitly mention how compute is disaggregated 3 ways now: prefill, predict, decode, and how a huge Jalapeno advantage is that it uses dark sillicon to switch between these without having to move the KV cache which remains local.
Then the article contradicts the slides because it states that OpenAI choose not to disaggregate prefill and decode. Idk you men with "predict"---conventional LLM serving comprises only two phases.
> it states that OpenAI choose not to disaggregate prefill and decode
They disaggregate INSIDE the chip, not by having separate machines for the 3 phases. the slides: