4 ms·

Are there available AI accelerators on the market at the same level of Google's? I worry we are being locked out of compute capacity. I worry these corporations

by alecco 6y ago

Are there available AI accelerators on the market at the same level of Google's? I worry we are being locked out of compute capacity. I worry these corporations did a hostile acquisition of all the talent and critical infrastructure and we are left out. And new competitors have such an uphill battle it will be almost impossible to catch up.

UncleOxidant 6y ago
You already needed a corporation just to create a regular, but state of the art general purpose processor. You're not going to do what Intel or Samsung does in your garage. Sure, with something like RISC-V you can design a processor and implement it in an FPGA, but that's going to run a lot slower than a processor that is a full-custom design. There are some smallish competitors in the AI accelerator space (Groq and Graphcore come to mind) that are trying to innovate architecturally, but I suspect the door is closing for these companies for the reasons you suggest. The ones with some good ideas will likely be bought out by the likes of Google and Microsoft.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- alecco 6y ago
  There are big players capable of opening it up like Philips, Sony, IBM, Microsoft, and several more. Or even if, in a weird twist of fate, China embraces an open hardware alliance. But it's looking very, very bad as things are right now.
  - UncleOxidant 6y ago
    China is already a big player in the RISC-V space and will likely dominate there. Ironically, this is at least partially due to the policies of the previous US Administration which is driving China to adopt the open RISC-V ISA so that they're not frozen out of US technology. But still, these are large players with a lot of money (gov funding in China's case). > There are big players capable of opening it up like Philips, Sony, IBM, Microsoft You forget Apple which with the M1 has proven that they can even outdo Intel. But again, Apple has a lot of $Billions to throw around. Microsoft seems to possibly also be making some processor moves, but we'll see how that works out (and again, $Billions to throw around)
    - alecco 6y ago
      Apple is definitevely part of the FAANG pseudo-oligopoly. And they are even less open than Google. They all buy up any competition who might disrupt the market. It's very sad. Even OpenAI turned out to be propietary and practically bought out by Microsoft. And that's mostly software.
vzidex 6y ago
> Are there available AI accelerators on the market at the same level as Google's? Not sure if they're quite at the same level (hard to measure apples against apples and all that), but there's a few companies in the space - namely, Groq, Cerebras, Tenstorrent, and Untether. Besides that, both major FPGA vendors have ML inference IP available. I'd also bet other FAANG-ish companies are trying, besides just Google, but I would expect anything to come out of them to also be compute-as-a-service like Google's hardware.
TaylorAlexander 6y ago
Nvidia is another big player, as is Tesla. One nice thing about California law is that employees can freely move to another company and work on similar things (no strong non compete enforcement, IANAL). So they can work at Google and design the good stuff and then move to other places and keep going. Tesla’s chip designer came from Apple for example.
Banana699 6y ago
> And new competitors have such an uphill battle it will be almost impossible to catch up. That's almost all of the science, engineering, industry and bureaucracy of modern civilization in general, not just the chip industry. Experts and organizations are more and more piling atop an impossibly high, increasingly disorganized and fragmented tower of knowledge without leaving formal markers and scaffolds to lead those who will come after them. How much of the knowledge that goes into manufacturing a modern car exists in a single resource called "How to build a 2020 car" ? hell scratch that, how much resources remotely detail how to build a single decent 90s-grade engine ? The fact that this is google is only tangentially related as it's only a subcase of the general problem that corporations hoard knowledge and research into proprietary "solutions" and "intellectual property": this would still be nearly just as dangerous if those building the chips were a bunch of highly-funded university researchers who know each other by name and are separated from the rest of humanity by billions of dollars of funding and literal lifetimes of knowledge that they're adding to without teaching to others. Not that I blame them (the words might sound as if I am), this is a far greater mess than any single one cause. It's an astonishingly underappreciated problem of modern civilization how black-boxy and fragmented it's institutions and knowledge have become.

by alecco 6y ago

UncleOxidant 6y ago

You already needed a corporation just to create a regular, but state of the art general purpose processor. You're not going to do what Intel or Samsung does in your garage. Sure, with something like RISC-V you can design a processor and implement it in an FPGA, but that's going to run a lot slower than a processor that is a full-custom design. There are some smallish competitors in the AI accelerator space (Groq and Graphcore come to mind) that are trying to innovate architecturally, but I suspect the door is closing for these companies for the reasons you suggest. The ones with some good ideas will likely be bought out by the likes of Google and Microsoft.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
alecco 6y ago
There are big players capable of opening it up like Philips, Sony, IBM, Microsoft, and several more. Or even if, in a weird twist of fate, China embraces an open hardware alliance. But it's looking very, very bad as things are right now.
- UncleOxidant 6y ago
  China is already a big player in the RISC-V space and will likely dominate there. Ironically, this is at least partially due to the policies of the previous US Administration which is driving China to adopt the open RISC-V ISA so that they're not frozen out of US technology. But still, these are large players with a lot of money (gov funding in China's case). > There are big players capable of opening it up like Philips, Sony, IBM, Microsoft You forget Apple which with the M1 has proven that they can even outdo Intel. But again, Apple has a lot of $Billions to throw around. Microsoft seems to possibly also be making some processor moves, but we'll see how that works out (and again, $Billions to throw around)
  - alecco 6y ago
    Apple is definitevely part of the FAANG pseudo-oligopoly. And they are even less open than Google. They all buy up any competition who might disrupt the market. It's very sad. Even OpenAI turned out to be propietary and practically bought out by Microsoft. And that's mostly software.

vzidex 6y ago

> Are there available AI accelerators on the market at the same level as Google's? Not sure if they're quite at the same level (hard to measure apples against apples and all that), but there's a few companies in the space - namely, Groq, Cerebras, Tenstorrent, and Untether. Besides that, both major FPGA vendors have ML inference IP available. I'd also bet other FAANG-ish companies are trying, besides just Google, but I would expect anything to come out of them to also be compute-as-a-service like Google's hardware.

TaylorAlexander 6y ago

Nvidia is another big player, as is Tesla. One nice thing about California law is that employees can freely move to another company and work on similar things (no strong non compete enforcement, IANAL). So they can work at Google and design the good stuff and then move to other places and keep going. Tesla’s chip designer came from Apple for example.

Banana699 6y ago

> And new competitors have such an uphill battle it will be almost impossible to catch up. That's almost all of the science, engineering, industry and bureaucracy of modern civilization in general, not just the chip industry. Experts and organizations are more and more piling atop an impossibly high, increasingly disorganized and fragmented tower of knowledge without leaving formal markers and scaffolds to lead those who will come after them. How much of the knowledge that goes into manufacturing a modern car exists in a single resource called "How to build a 2020 car" ? hell scratch that, how much resources remotely detail how to build a single decent 90s-grade engine ? The fact that this is google is only tangentially related as it's only a subcase of the general problem that corporations hoard knowledge and research into proprietary "solutions" and "intellectual property": this would still be nearly just as dangerous if those building the chips were a bunch of highly-funded university researchers who know each other by name and are separated from the rest of humanity by billions of dollars of funding and literal lifetimes of knowledge that they're adding to without teaching to others. Not that I blame them (the words might sound as if I am), this is a far greater mess than any single one cause. It's an astonishingly underappreciated problem of modern civilization how black-boxy and fragmented it's institutions and knowledge have become.