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AI Chip Architectures
- hadlock 24d agoMaybe it's just me, but between the extremely thin font and layout design, I find this extremely difficult to parse. Overuse and improper use of italics is confusing as well.
- SomeHacker44 24d agoI didn't believe it till I tried to read it. Insane. Impossible to read.
- monkeydust 24d agoYea stresses the brain to much. I have built my own reader app, one of the simple things it does is very quickly convert article to highly readable font, with correct spacing on dark mode. Most things I read now are through that all, plus it saves it locally and remembers where I left off so useful for long form reads when I am on tube.
- pure_magic 24d agoThis text is most likely AI-generated. Borderline unreadable.
- postalrat 24d agoMost like AI generated? If you can't tell then what's the problem?
- catlifeonmars 24d agoIt’s shorthand for “it’s unreadable, but in the way an AI would write it”. I’m not OP, but that’s the issue. If it was well written (even if AI written), there would be no problem. As it turns out, you still need to be a good writer in order to prompt an AI to write well.
- ghurtado 24d agoWise people tend not to talk in absolutes, because they always realize they might be wrong. Ignorant people are always certain.
- Zacharias030 24d agoalways?
- ghurtado 24d agoI am one of the ignorant ones, after all, so I'm probably wrong on this. Wait...
- catlifeonmars 24d agoThis is just a rephrasing of the Dunning-Krueger effect, but quantized to a binary domain (ignorant vs wise).
- 0x20cowboy 24d agoStrong opinions…
- paaloeye 24d agodef. AI-assisted, both content and style style/nav. Content-wise, it looks legit, but with that amount of stuff, it's nearly impossible to say for sure. Not slope tho!
- ghurtado 24d agoThere's no borderline about it. When the density of italicized words is about 1:1, I'm out.
- iamflimflam1 24d agoMy meatbag or robot scored it as likely a robot and most likely Claude. https://meatbag.atomic14.com/ https://meatbag.atomic14.com/
- mk89 24d agoI just used it on 4 texts. The 1st version was the output from my first (chatGPT) prompt. The 4th was the last prompts of "reduce, make it less AI, etc" of the same original request/output. In all cases it was meatbag. In the 1st case gave chatGPT 0.35. The remaining ones were much lower. EDIT: I didn't ask just to generate some text. The original prompt was very specific, which is most of the time the way I use LLMs anyways. Probably it catches better the "hey just generate this email...".
- alain94040 23d agoI'm surprised by this comment. It's probably mostly AI generated, but I have no problem reading the first 10 pages, and I found them clear and correct. Might be that we come at this page with different experience and knowledge. I'm not seeing any specifically hard to read AI here.
- jhide 24d ago[dead]
- paaloeye 24d agoNot too shabby, but it shouldn't have been like 3 posts
- brcmthrowaway 24d agoI have a feeling the hardware architecture for LLMs are completely wrong. There's no way hundreds of kilowatts is required for intelligence.. just in terms of the physics. Is there someone out there in the analog/neuromorphic computing world that could make these power-hungry monsters completely redundant?
- jagged-chisel 24d agoI have a gut feeling the particular stochastic processes we’re currently using are the wrong ones to go beyond LLMs into actual intelligence.
- logicallee 24d agohuman brain uses 20 watts.
- skyberrys 24d agoIt's more the economics of what sells that lets the power hungry monsters thrive. If you can tape out one chip design, and one gives you 1 TOPS and the other is 5 TOPS, the sales will go to the 5 TOPS because power is a downstream cost. That being said, it's only a matter of time before both chips are maximum TOPS and the only differentiator is power. My latest simulations are showing a competitive design around 70W, but I'm still confirming it and it would really be beneficial to do some data gathering tapeouts at larger nodes to feel like it's worth the risk of more expensive nodes.
- brcmthrowaway 24d agoSystolic hardware?
- skyberrys 24d agoRace logic with pulses, it's a descent of systolic arrays. There is less of an array shape and more about time.
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- ilaksh 24d agoThose are amazing accomplishments but I am more interested in research developments in things like In-Memory (Analog) or other different approaches. Companies like EnCharge, Mythic, etc. And much more efficient devices like RRAM, MRAM, and FETs. Like FE-FETs with AlScN. The stuff just coming out of research or still in research is more exciting in terms of the potential for truly huge efficiency and performance boosts. Taalas is interesting also because of it's efficiency and speed. Guess it was just purchased by AMD.
- skew-aberration 24d agoI'm not sure that more efficient compute can win out, since it also has to beat out the competition on capital investment. There's an upper bound of 'just get 3 sets of GPUs and run them on solar in three different timezones' where the cost of electricity is negligible. Efficient digital architectures run about 1/5 or 1/10th the speed and require much more wafer area. Analog technologies seem unlikely to have the fidelity required for training, though inference sounds plausible. It's also not clear that analog technologies would necessarily use less power.
- ilaksh 23d agoSome technologies will definitely be much faster and much more power efficient. They haven't come out of research or if they have they have not been scaled yet, so it's not 100% proven. But it looks likely for multiple options to get there.
- eru 22d agoTransistors are most power efficient when they are either completely open (no resistance) or completely closed (no current). If they are in some analog half-open state they have both resistance and current, which means waste heat. Also transistors in modern chips are already so small that you can literally count the number of electrons flowing through them. At the smallest scale, nature becomes discrete. So if there are something like 128 electrons, you only get 7 bits of 'analog' to play with anyway.
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- brcmthrowaway 24d agoCan memristors help AI?
- martheen 24d agoIf they ever figure out how to make it in any usable scale, maybe.
- peter_d_sherman 24d agoI personally found this article highly educational... One of the best deep-dives on AI chip architectures that I've ever read. Other posters are welcome to their opinions, but I (again, personally) thought it was great!
- hliyan 24d agoIs anyone working on running neural networks on CPU architectures that are not limited by synchronous clock signals? Organic neural networks are inherently asynchronous and signals propagate through different parts of the network at their own pace.
- jpecar 24d agoYes, for over a decade now and it's already available in the cloud. It's a spinn-off of human brain project. Search for spinnaker neuromorphic computing.
- esperent 22d agoI had a quick look around and it seems like this is very specifically designed and used for the Human Brain Project, which ended in 2023 and at least according to wiki the most recent version of this was from 2019. Is it still being worked on, and is it actively being developed for anything outside of brain simulation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpiNNaker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpiNNaker
- giancarlostoro 24d agoMicrosofts Bitnet is really solid on CPUs (though still better to train on a GPU for speedier training) but theres a lot of room for improvement in these spaces.
- geremiiah 24d agoIt's an interesting topic, but the article is completely AI generated, which isn't surprising considering the startup, but still, if you don't even go over the output what's the point?
- cman1444 23d agoHow do you know they didn't go over it?
- klm127 24d agoAI chips feel like a gimmick. An excuse to add "powered by ai chips" to the marketing material. That sort of phrase in on just about every consumer laptop now. My brother bought one. I challenged him to find something that actually used the AI chip on the laptop. He couldn't - it always read at 0% in task manager. As a consumer, I'd rather have that much more graphics card, hard drive space, or RAM for the price than a specialized chip thats almost never used and, when it is used, only saves you a little electricity.
- anentropic 24d agoFWIW the article is not talking about those kind of AI chips at all
- 6keZbCECT2uB 23d agoI did not spot any errors in my skim of the architectures I'm familiar with where I would expect an LLM to go wrong, and it has a nicely scoped overview of topics that people in the space should familiarize themselves with. I don't think I've seen a better primer.