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A comment on Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height. Parent comment

Re:Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great h... by m0zg on Monday February 24, 2020 @04:45PM (#22408777)
As someone who has actually worked on this stuff soup to nuts, it's not as easy as people imagine, because you can't just support some subset of available ops and call it a day. If you want to make OpenCL pie from scratch, you must first make the universe, and support every single stupid thing (among thousands) and even mimic some of the bugs so that models work "the same".

This is hard and time consuming, and this field is hard enough as it is. What makes it even harder is that only NVIDIA has decent, mature tooling. There is some work on ROCM though, so AMD is not _totally_ dead in the water. I'd say they're about 90% dead in the water.

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Re:Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great h... by derefr on Monday February 24, 2020 @05:44PM (#22409251)
> support every single stupid thing (among thousands) and even mimic some of the bugs so that models work "the same".

Do you need to do the stupid things performantly, though? Because that sounds like a case for skipping microcode shims, and going straight to instructions that trap into a software implementation. Or just running the whole compute-kernel in a driver-side software emulator that then compiles real sub-kernels for each stretch of non-stupid GPGPU instructions, uploads those, and then calls into them from the software emulation at the right moments. Like a profile-guided JIT, but one that can't actually JIT everything, only some things.

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Re:Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great h... by fizixer on Monday February 24, 2020 @05:46PM (#22409268)
I know Tensorflow decided to be cuda-exclusive for the silly reason that the matrix library they were using (eigen) only supported cuda.

I have never recovered from that.

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Re:Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great h... by simonebrunozzi on Monday February 24, 2020 @04:49PM (#22408819)
Are you in the Bay area? Would love to chat. Thinking of an idea where your expertise could be very handy. $my-hn-username at gmail.
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