I wish there was a thousand more geohots than all the mediocre middle-managers at AMD or tenstorrent; or people who have never done anything beyond posting snarky comments in online forums.
Sadly, I think geohot is an example of someone who earned some cred for impressive accomplishments in the past and then tried to cash in that cred over and over again in unrelated future domains.
His brief and very public flame out at Twitter after mysteriously abandoning another project and the bold claims about his AMD work that never really translated to anything have really detracted from whatever past “cred” he built up. I really hope he can find a new niche and succeed, but until then it might be time to lie low on social media and avoid throwing more mud.
>I think geohot is an example of someone who earned some cred for impressive accomplishments in the past [...]
Huh? Yeah, that's what I wrote.
You cut out the part of my post where I made my point.
Earning “cred” for past accomplishments doesn’t give someone a free pass forever to be a loud mouth.
>Earning “cred” for past accomplishments doesn’t give someone a free pass forever to be a loud mouth.
What the ... ? Sorry, but you don't have to earn that. I suggest you familiarize yourself with human rights, particularly if you won the lottery and were born in a country like the US; it is very clearly written, in unambiguous terms, the rights their citizens enjoy.
And still, I'd rather listen to geohot rambling about whatever he wants to say, than some randos on the internet who have accomplished nothing but "arguing". Respect is not a right, it is earned, he's earned mine.
With AMD the experience is so poor that you have to save the company from itself if you want to make progress.
The ventures he has started (I can think of tinygrad and comma ai) all seem like half finished tech demos.
Edit: you edited your comment after I told you he made comma.ai.
Bit dishonest, but whatever, I wouldn't describe comma.ai as a "half finished tech demo" but you're allowed to your own opinion about it.
His AMD rants were a valuable warning about the quality of their hardware. I wish he'd done that maybe 10 years ago when I was buying AMD cards thinking that they might work with pytorch in a year or so. I knew they had problems but if I'd realised how bad the situation was I'd have held my nose and gone with Nvidia.
edit: For what it's worth, if you can't see that this language is rude or think it is somehow acceptable for people of a certain caliber to talk this way - you're also probably toxic.
What I'm saying is, tensorrent couldn't find a more excitable third-party developer if they grew one in a lab. And you know what? I can't make heads or tails out of all their various abstractions. I've tried! I've read the docs, I've read the examples, I've gone to meetups. I think OP is right that "one more abstraction bro" probably doesn't solve the problem.
At a guess, the problem isn't a technical one, it is an organizational one. They don't have anybody to stand in for me, or devs like me (eg dumb people). There is no product leadership on the API design. Just a lot of really brilliant engineers obsessively tuning for their own usecases, unwilling to ever trade-off a hit in performance or expressivity for readability or writeability.
bigyabai•5h ago
> You aren't going to get better deals on tapeouts/IP than NVIDIA/AMD. You need some advantage.
> If you want a dataflow graph compiler, build a dataflow graph compiler.
Now explain why. Clearly Tenstorrent is happy to build Yet Another Abstraction Layer, so instead of bullying them over it you should at least attempt to actively humiliate them for the approach. You know, produce some manner of evidence that vindicates your position instead of relying on your authority alone. Jim Keller has no reason to take this seriously, even if you're right.
Without any numbers this feels like one cult of personality trying to bait another into a shit-flinging contest as a marketing scheme. We've seen this happen several times before on Hacker News, and it doesn't end up with either side making an Nvidia-killer. This is not a model for productive discourse.
RealityVoid•3h ago
Geohot is abrasive to say the least, and, no, this is not a model for productive discourse(I'll try not to bring in some of his hot takes on the stream because giving them stage is probably also not productive) But I do think he has good taste in SW and he might be right about the number of layers of abstraction.
For context, geohot wrote this live on a twitch stream.
Havoc•2h ago
Pretty sure comma is profitable? Not particularly, but for a hardware startup selling multiple iterations and not getting wrecked is a sound start