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I used to enjoy reading John’s columns back in the day. I guess I always wondered in the back of my mind whether he was related to the keyboard layout Dvorak. T
by eigenvalue 3y ago
I used to enjoy reading John’s columns back in the day. I guess I always wondered in the back of my mind whether he was related to the keyboard layout Dvorak. Turns out he’s his nephew according to the article. Now I’m wondering if they are both related to the famous Czech composer.
Anyway, it’s pretty wild for me to think of a fairly plausible alternate history that could have developed if, say, Andy Grove had an unshakable belief in the power of neural nets in the late 80s and 90s and was willing to continually reinvest Intel’s huge x86 profits in that direction, developing TPU-like ASICs until they started working well for real world applications. We might have ended up with something like Llama2 7B 15-20 years ago (although inference would probably be painfully slow, like 5 tokens a second), or at least Whisper.
- ghaff 3y agoYou can only short-circuit technology trees so much most of the time. Storage/networks/etc. probably weren't up to the task that early.
- eigenvalue 3y agoWe’ve had servers with hundreds of gigs of RAM for a long time, although they were obviously expensive back then. I really don’t see a specific reason why we couldn’t have done it then from a hardware standpoint. I think it’s really because of the AI Winter and Minsky’s book that showed a simple perceptron couldn’t handle XOR that made the whole space seem like toxic waste to VCs and corporate tech executives of the time.
- bombcar 3y ago> Now I’m wondering if they are both related to the famous Czech composer. A quick search didn't turn up anything, but given the location and the Czech name, I suspect a relationship could be found at some distance. Interestingly enough, I learned the composer was a train-spotter (in modern terms, a railfan).