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Comment by scoopertrooper | Hacker News Reader

I don’t see how they’re going to commercialise this as a cloud compute service.

For one, they’ve built a chip that operates in a fundamentally different way to other chips. So any other company that wanted to use it would have to invest a considerable amount of resources in building up the institutional knowledge to use it effectively.

Additionally, the lack of virtual memory and multi-tasking support renders it pretty much impossible to divide up compute between multiple customers. So, commercialising this would require customers renting out the whole unit, which is contrary to how cloud computing usually works.

Are there companies out there that have the capital and use cases necessary to fit into Dojo Cloud? Maybe, though not one I’ve worked for. Would they trust the stable genius currently heading up Tesla enough to make such an investment? Perhaps, but I wouldn’t, but what do I know?

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> Additionally, the lack of virtual memory and multi-tasking support renders it pretty much impossible to divide up compute between multiple customers. So, commercialising this would require customers renting out the whole unit, which is contrary to how cloud computing usually works.

Only if you want to subdivide the compute on each dojo chip. You can still provide multi-tenant, support by allocating entire dojo chips to a single customer at a time. Even traditional time division multi-tasking is possible as long as you’re happy to accept multi-second long time slices. Then the overhead of clearing an entire dojo chip (or batch of chips), and setting up a new application, isn’t too high.

If you’re doing AI workloads, then none of the above are an issue. Training a large net takes days to weeks of continuous, single task computation. So selling dojo access in whole 1 hour blocks is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Part of the plan is to have PyTorch compatibility.

Dojo has it's own IR but they also have a PyTorch to Dojo compiler.

People's opinion of Musk wont matter: either Dojo will be a capable service at a good price or it won't.

People will use it based on merits.

Reliability is an important factor here, and I don't mean technology. Things don't look so good for everything that has to do with Musk. Today like this, tomorrow like that

>Things don't look so good for everything that has to do with Musk. Today like this, tomorrow like that

Such as? Except for FSD, his record is unmatched AFAIK when you take into account the novelty / complexity / difficulty.

One example, and certainly his main achievement: he said Tesla would sell and produce half a million cars by 2020, back in early 2014, and they hit that number with a 93.6% precision. https://youtu.be/BwUuo6e10AM?t=156

Some of Musk's stuff is great - other stuff isn't.

SpaceX? Great. Starlink? Sounds neat. Tesla? Pioneered electric cars with respectable performance and range.

But on the other hand, where's the hyperloop? Where's the affordable tunnelling? Where's the $35k Tesla - not available for order on the website, that's for sure. Where's the miniature submarine for rescuing children trapped in caves? Why has my buddy in Europe been waiting over a year for his powerwall to be delivered? Why are these norwegian tesla owners on hunger strike? Where's the full self driving, with taxi service? Why on earth would anyone want to buy Twitter?

Makes it very difficult to know which of Musk's statements are just spitballing, which are unrealistic timescale guesses and which can be relied on.

Getting any serious project architecturally 'locked in' to a special type of CPU you can only get from Tesla would be a bold move.

It's simple, SpaceX, Tesla and Starlink are evolutions of existing technology.

FSD, Hyperloop and such would be revolution like out of a Sci-Fi movie. They fail all because Musk like would like to have those things but in reality these things are much more complicated as he says.

How is the Las Vegas tunnel going? Or the brain implant?

He is good at marketing and developing existing technology.

But of his announced revolutions, none works.

yes, you still write checks to pay online and rocket boosters to this day are single use $100M pieces of hardware that we throw away into the ocean after each use.

seriously. musk is shady and weird, more so in the last couple of years, but come on.

It's about the perception of Musk. He built some successful companies but he is not Tony Stark as people tend him to see. He is a salesman not an genius inventor.

Don't expect FSD in the near future and don't expect a Mars colony.

FSD, especially the way he was describing it, was a blunder. the Mars city is a pipe dream... but I absolutely understand why it makes people follow him - he's the only one who set out to build a private space company with the purpose to actually get to Mars, with the side effect of completely uprooting the space launch industry. the achievements are undeniable, but it's the vision that makes the perception be so surprisingly good still. there's literally nobody else who says things like that and has the means to even try.

Reliability? Name one major cloud service where you can count on not getting randomly banned overnight. And yet people still use them.

Like I wrote, it's not about technology but it's chief

Next week he tweets he will take the service offline to buy AWS and then calls it off, that kind of reliability

> I don’t see how they’re going to commercialise this as a cloud compute service.

The simples most obvious would be “give me your datasets and we’ll train your model”

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