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Let’s just say what it is: devs are too constrained to jump ship right now. It’s a massive land grab and you are not going to spend time tinkering with CUDA alt
by lvl155 11mo ago
Let’s just say what it is: devs are too constrained to jump ship right now. It’s a massive land grab and you are not going to spend time tinkering with CUDA alternatives when even a six-month delay can basically kill your company/organization. Google and Apple are two companies with enough resources to do it. Google isn’t because they’re keeping it proprietary to their cloud. Apple still have their heads stuck in sand barely capable of fixing Siri.
- stingraycharles 11mo agoGoogle has their own TPUs so they don’t have any vendor lock-in issues at all. OpenAI OTOH is big enough that the vendor lock-in is actually hurting them, and them making that massive deal with AMD may finally push the needle for AMD and improve things in the ecosystem to make AMD a smooth experience.
- apfsx 11mo agoGoogle’s TPU’s are not powering Gemini or whatever X equivalent LLM you want to compare to.
- rdudek 11mo agoWhat is powering Gemini?
- jsolson 11mo agoTPUs: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/Model-Cards/Gemini-3-Pro-Model-Card.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/Model-Cards/Ge...
- rfw300 11mo agoThis isn't true. Gemini is trained and run almost entirely on TPUs. Anthropic also uses TPUs for inference, see, e.g., https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanding-our-use-of-google-cloud-tpus-and-services https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanding-our-use-of-google-c... and https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/a-postmortem-of-three-recent-issues https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/a-postmortem-of-three-.... OpenAI also uses TPUs for inference at least in some measure: https://x.com/amir/status/1938692182787137738?t=9QNb0hfaQShWoB65AeyWvw&s=19 https://x.com/amir/status/1938692182787137738?t=9QNb0hfaQShW....
- skirmish 11mo agoI can assure you that most internal ML teams are using TPUs both for training and inference, they are just so much easier to get. Whatever GPUs exist are either reserved for Google Cloud customers, or loaned temporarily to researchers who want to publish easily externally reproducible results.
- stingraycharles 11mo agoThey are, even Apple famously uses Google Cloud for their cloud based AI stuff solely because of Apple not wanting to buy NVidia. Google Cloud does have a lot of NVidia, but that’s for their regular cloud customers, not internal stuff.
- jsolson 11mo agoThis comment is incorrect: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/Model-Cards/Gemini-3-Pro-Model-Card.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/Model-Cards/Ge...
- throwaway31131 11mo agoHaving your own ASIC comes with a huge sunk cost. One gets advantages from that, but it's still a lock, just a lock of a different color. But with Google money and manpower, management can probably pursue both paths in parallel and not care.