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Comment by piskov | Hacker News Reader

Is Geohot (George Hotz) part of this project or is it a parallel undertaking?

It's parallel. Notably, Geohot's focus has been on improving ROCm directly while this project focuses more on improving the downstream tooling.

What contributions did he make to ROCm?

In your words, "He found a bug, and made a bunch of noise about it."

He is doing full stack, and is selling tinybox (a PC with 6 AMD GPUs in it).

As he went through the hard work of debugging the driver and getting AMD to care about it, I was expecting to see him in the acknowledgements.

Didn't he just find/report a bug in the multi-gpu case? Then have a melt-down after an AMD engineer sent him a fix a couple of days later? I think you are overstating his contributions, in fact it's not clear to me he made any.

He shows the git patch fix delivered by AMD engineers. The root cause is not explained and the change itself is about 2-3 SLoC — his frustration, what you call meltdown, is not about the interaction with AMD rather how troublesome it was to get AMD’s demo scripts to run on AMD’s chips.

Feeling frustration about something not working is a normal part of software development. Reporting a bug, or choosing not to use that software are normal too. Making a public video trashing the work of 100s, using the language he did, is a meltdown.

I've worked on public software before, and it's left me with an extremely low opinion of this kind of behaviour, and the kind of people that show it.

He literally had a phone call with CEO of AMD, and got them to organize people to fix the problems. He has been whipping AMD into fixing their drivers

Do you work at AMD and therefore have some kind of insight that we don't? Based on my own experience it's much more likely the call was just a marketing exercise, completely orthogonal to actual development.

Gfx drivers are complicated, long term projects. They're not something that get fixed with a phone call.

He found a bug, and made a bunch of noise about it. No need to make it more than it was.

Off topic but feels like a good place to ask? Can WebGPU give you decent performance on non-Cuda and help accomplish these kinds of aims? (Geohot I think is aiming to avoid a single chipmaker monopoly on AI which he sees as a bad thing /paraphrase)

As of today performance in WebGPU isn't as competitive yet, but there are really quite a lot of low-hanging fruits for WebGPU to pick up.

no. different project https://tinygrad.org/

He was the one who pushed AMD to improve their drivers. So yeah, without him this wouldn't be possible.

Has there been a driver release from AMD since geohot had a call with their CEO? Otherwise I don’t see how you can attribute this entirely to him.

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