Comment by ryao
2 months ago
I read tinygrad’s website:
https://tinygrad.org/#tinygrad
Under driver quality for AMD, they say “developing” and point to their git repository. If AMD had fixed the issues, they would instead say the driver quality is great and get more sales.
They can still get sales even if they are honest about the state of AMD hardware, since they sell Nvidia hardware too, while your company would risk 0 sales if you say anything other than “everything is fine”, since your business is based on leasing AMD GPUs:
Given your enormous conflict of interest, I will listen to what George Hotz and others are saying over what you say on this matter.
Exactly, it is not a driver.
Appreciate you diving more into my business. Yes, we are one of the few that publishes transparent pricing.
When we started, we got zero sales, for a long time. Nobody knew if these things performed or not. So we donated hardware and people like ChipsAndCheese started to benchmark and write blog posts.
We knew the hardware was good, but the software sucked. 16 or so months later, things have changed and sufficiently improved that now we are at capacity. My deep involvement in this business is exactly how I know what’s going on.
Yes, I have a business to run, but at the same time, I was willing to take the risk, when no-one else would, and deploy this compute. To insinuate that I have some sort of conflict of interest is unfair, especially without knowing the full story.
At this juncture, I don’t know what point you’re trying to make. We agree the software sucked. Tinygrad now runs on mi300x. Whatever George’s motivations were a year ago are no longer true today.
If you feel rocm sucks so badly, go the tinygrad route. Same if you don’t want to be tied to cuda. Choice is a good thing. At the end of the day though, this isn’t a reflection on the hardware at all.
I hope your business works out for you and I am willing to believe that AMD has improved somewhat, but I do not believe AMD has improved enough to be worth people’s time when Nvidia is an option. I have heard too many nightmares and it is going to take many people, including people who reported those nightmares, reporting improvements for me to think otherwise. It is not just George Hotz who reported issues. Eric Hartford has been quiet lately, but one of the last comments he made on his blog was not very inspiring:
> Know that you are in for rough waters. And even when you arrive - There are lots of optimizations tailored for nVidia GPUs so, even though the hardware may be just as strong spec-wise, in my experience so far, it still may take 2-3 times as long to train on equivalient AMD hardware. (though if you are a super hacker maybe you can fix it!)
https://erichartford.com/from-zero-to-fineturning-with-axolo...
There has been no follow-up “it works great now”.
That said, as for saying you have a conflict of interest, let us consider what a conflict of interest is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest
> A conflict of interest (COI) is a situation in which a person or organization is involved in multiple interests, financial or otherwise, and serving one interest could involve working against another.
You run a company whose business is dependent entirely on leasing AMD GPUs. Here, you want to say that AMD’s hardware is useful for that purpose and no longer has the deluge of problems others reported last year. If it has not improved, saying such could materially negatively impact your business. This by definition is a conflict of interest.
That is quite a large conflict of interest, given that it involves your livelihood. You are incentivized to make things look better than they are, which affects your credibility when you say that things are fine after there has been ample evidence in the recent past that they have not been. In AMD’s case, poor driver quality is something that they inherited from ATI and the issues goes back decades. While it is believable that AMD has improved their drivers, I find it difficult to believe that they have improved them enough that things are fine now, given history. Viewing your words as being less credible because of these things might be unfair, but there have been plenty of people whose livelihoods depended on things working before you that outright lied about the fitness of products. They even lied when people’s lives were at risk:
https://hackaday.com/2015/10/26/killed-by-a-machine-the-ther...
You could be correct in everything you say, but I have good reason to be skeptical until there has been information from others corroborating it. Blame all of the people who were in similar positions to yours that lied in the past for my skepticism. That said, I will keep my ears open for good news from others who use AMD hardware in this space, but I have low expectations given history.
Funny to see you quoting Eric, he’s a friend and was just running on one of our systems. AMD bought credits from us and donated compute time to him as part of the big internal changes they’re pushing. That kind of thing wouldn’t have happened a year ago. And from his experience, the software has come a long way. Stuff is moving so fast, that you aren't even keeping up, but I am the one driving it forward.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44154174
And sigh, here we are again with the conflict of interest comments, as if I don’t get it. As I said, you don’t know the full story, so let me spell it out. I’m not doing this for money, status, or fame. I’m fortunate enough that I don’t need a job, this isn’t about livelihood or personal gain.
I’m doing this because I genuinely care about the future of this industry. I believe AI is as transformational as the early Internet. I’ve been online since 1991 (BBS before that), and I’ve seen how monopolies can strangle innovation. A world where one company controls all AI hardware and software is a terrible outcome. Imagine if Cisco made every router or Windows was the only OS. That’s where we’re headed with Nvidia, and I refuse to accept that.
Look at my history and who my investor is, this isn’t some VC land grab. We truly care about decentralizing and democratizing compute. Our priority is getting this previously locked up behind supercomps HPC into the hands of as many developers as possible. My cofounder and I are lifelong nerds and developers, doing this because it matters.
Right now, only two companies are truly competing in this space. You’ve fairly pointed out failures of Cerebras and Groq. AMD is the only one with a real shot at breaking the monopoly. They’re behind, yes. But they were behind in CPUs too, and look where that went. If AMD continues on the path they’re on now, they can absolutely become a viable alternative. Make no mistake, humanity needs an alternative and I'll do my best to make that a reality.
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