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Comment by toisanji | Hacker News Reader

I want the NVIDIA monopoly to end, but there is no real competition still. * George Hotz has basically given up on AMD: https://x.com/__tinygrad__/status/1770151484363354195

* Groq can't produce more hardware past their "demo". It seems like they haven't grown capacity in the years since they announced, and they switched to a complete SaaS model and don't even sell hardware anymore.

* I dont know enough about MLX, Triton, and JAX,

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I also noticed that Groq's Chief Architect now works for NVIDIA.

https://research.nvidia.com/person/dennis-abts

That George Hotz tweet is from March last year. He's gone back and forth on AMD a bunch more times since then.

is that good or bad?

Honestly I tried searching his recent tweets for AMD and there was way too much noise in there to figure out his current position!

" we are going to move it off AMD to our own or partner silicon. We have developed it to be very portable."

https://x.com/__tinygrad__/status/1879617702526087346

Honest question. That sounds more difficult that getting things to play with commodity hardware. Maybe I am oversimplifying it though.

They have their own nn,etc libraries so adapting should be fairly focused and AMD drivers have a hilariously bad reputation historically among people who program GPU's (I've been bitten a couple of times myself by weirdness).

I think you should consider it as, if they're trying to avoid Nvidia and make sure their code isn't tied to NVidia-isms, and AMD is troublesome enough for basics the step to customized solutions is small enough to be worthwhile for something even cheaper than AMD.

Thanks, I don't have any experience in this realm and this was helpful to digest the problem space.

I consider it a good sign that he hasn’t completely given up. But it sure all seems shaky.

The same Hotz who lasted like 4 weeks at Twitter after announcing that he'd fix everything? It doesn't really inspire a ton of confidence that he can single handedly take down Nvidia...

It looks like he’s close to having own AMD stack, tweet linked in the article, Jan 15,2025: https://x.com/__tinygrad__/status/1879615316378198516

$1000 bounty? That's like 2 hours of development time at market rate lol

We'll check in again with him in 3 months and he'll still be just 1 piece away.

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