Comment by mg

12 hours ago

Six months of one developer tuning the kernel?

That seems like not much compared to the hundreds of billions of dollars US companies currently invest into their AI stack? OpenAI pays thousands of engineers and researchers full time.

It is. The problem is latency. All these fields are moving very fast, and so it doesn't sound bad spending 6 months tuning something, but in reality what is happening is that during those 6 months the guy who built the thing you're tuning has iterated 5 more times and what you started on 6 months ago is now much much better than what you got handed 6 months ago whilst simultaneously being much worse than what that person has in their hands today. If the field you're working in is relatively static, or your performance gap is large enough it makes sense. But in most fields the performance gap is large in absolutely terms but small in temporal terms. You could make something run 10x faster, but you can't build something that will run faster than what will be state of the art in 2 months.