alt Hacker NewsI'm surprised people are surprised. Of course this is possible, and of course this is the future. This has been demonstrated already: why do you think we even have GPUs at all?! Because we did this exact same transition from running in software to largely running in hardware for all 2D and 3D Computer Graphics. And these LLMs are practically the same math, it's all just obvious and inevitable, if you're paying attention to what we have, what we do to have what we have.
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"This has been demonstrated already…"
I think burning the weights into the gates is kinda new.
("Weights to gates." "Weighted gates"? "Gated weights"?)
It's not certain this is the future: the obvious trade off is lack of flexibility: not only when a new model comes out, but also varying demand in the data centers - one day people want more LLM queries, another day more diffusion queries. Aaand, this blocks the holly grail of self improving models, beyond in-context learning. A realistic use case? More efficient vision based drone targeting in Ukraine/Taiwan/ whatevers next. That's the place where energy efficiency, processing speed, and also weight is most critical. Not sure how heavy ASICS are though, bit they should be proportional to the model size. I heard many complaints about onboard AI 'not being there yet', and this may change it. Not listing middle east as there is no serious jamming problem there.
I'd be kind of shocked if Nvidia isn't playing with this.
I don't expect it's like super commercially viable today, but for sure things need to trend to radically more efficient AI solutions.
Doesn't Google have custom TPUs that are kind of a halfway point between Taalas' approach and a generic GPU? I wonder if that kind of hardware will reach consumers. It probably will, though as I understand them NPUs aren't quite it.
Are people surprised?
I think the interesting point is the transition time. When is it ROI-positive to tape out a chip for your new model? There’s a bunch of fun infra to build to make this process cheaper/faster and I imagine MoE will bring some challenges.
> Because we did this exact same transition from running in software to largely running in hardware for all 2D and 3D Computer Graphics.
We transitioned from software on CPUs to fixed GPU hardware... But then we transitioned back to software running on GPUs! So there's no way you can say "of course this is the future".
Job specific ASICs are are “old as time.”
I believe this is a CPU/GPU vs ASIC comparison, rather than CPU vs GPU. They have always(ish) coexisted, being optimized for different things: ASICs have cost/speed/power advantages, but the design is more difficult than writing a computer program, and you can't reprogram them.
Generally, you use an ASIC to perform a specific task. In this case, I think the takeaway is the LLM functionality here is performance-sensitive, and has enough utility as-is to choose ASIC.