This would be a very interesting future. I can imagine Gemma 5 Mini running locally on hardware, or a hard-coded "AI core" like an ALU or media processor that supports particular encoding mechanisms like H.264, AV1, etc. Other than the obvious costs (but Taalas seems to be bringing back the structured ASIC era so costs shouldn't be that low [1]), I'm curious why this isn't getting much attention from larger companies…
Well even programmable ASICs like Cerebras and Groq give many-multiples speedup over GPUs and the market has hardly reacted at all.
How Taalas “prints” LLM onto a chip?
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Re: How Taalas “prints” LLM onto a chip?
#52I wonder how well this works with MoE architectures? For dense LLMs, like llama-3.1-8B, you profit a lot from having all the weights available close to the actual multiply-accumulate hardware. With MoE, it is rather like a memory lookup. Instead of a 1:1 pairing of MACs to stored weights, you suddenly are forced to have a large memory block next to a small MAC block. And once this mismatch becomes large enough, there…
I feel printing ASIC is the main block here.
Re: How Taalas “prints” LLM onto a chip?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well even programmable ASICs like Cerebras and Groq give many-multiples speedup over GPUs and the market has hardly reacted at all.
> market has hardly reacted at all Guess who acqui-hired Groq to push this into GPUs? The name GPU has been an anachronism for a couple of years now.
Re: How Taalas “prints” LLM onto a chip?
#54Models would be available as USB plug-in devices. A dense I hope lots of vendors will take note. Open weight models are abundant now. Even at a few thousand tokens/second, low buying cost and low operating cost, this is massive.
Re: How Taalas “prints” LLM onto a chip?
#55Who's going to pay for custom chips when they shit out new models every two weeks and their deluded CEOs keep promising AGI in two release cycles?
Current open weight models < 20B are already capable of being useful. With even 1K tokens/second, they would change what it means to interact with them or for models to interact with the computer.
Re: How Taalas “prints” LLM onto a chip?
#56Perhaps mask manufacturers?
Re: How Taalas “prints” LLM onto a chip?
#57Re: How Taalas “prints” LLM onto a chip?
#58> Kinda like a CD-ROM/Game cartridge, or a printed book, it only holds one model and cannot be rewritten. Imagine a slot on your computer where you physically pop out and replace the chip with different models, sort of like a Nintendo DS.
That slot is called USB-C. I can fully imagine inference ASICs coming in powerbank form factor that you'd just plug and play.
Re: How Taalas “prints” LLM onto a chip?
#59Who's going to pay for custom chips when they shit out new models every two weeks and their deluded CEOs keep promising AGI in two release cycles?
New GPUs come out all the time. New phones come out (if you count all the manufacturers) all the time. We do not need to always buy the new one. Current open weight models < 20B are already capable of being useful. With even 1K tokens/second, they would change what it means to interact with them or for models to interact with the computer.
Re: How Taalas “prints” LLM onto a chip?
#60Who's going to pay for custom chips when they shit out new models every two weeks and their deluded CEOs keep promising AGI in two release cycles?
Talas promises a 10x higher throughtput, being 10x cheaper and using 10x less electricity.
Looks like a good value proposition.