Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by iamgopal 930 days ago
It’s bottleneck on Nvidia side. They are producing less than Tesla consume. Tesla compute power will outclass many cloud provider combined in just three or four years with their own custom chip.
2 comments

> It’s bottleneck on Nvidia side. They are producing less than Tesla consume. Tesla compute power will outclass many cloud provider combined in just three or four years with their own custom chip.

That seems like a bold claim. Google, Microsoft and Meta make so much more money than Telsa that if making AI chips was so easy, then they could clearly out design and build Tesla without thinking too hard about it.

What makes you think that Telsa, a company with far less AI workers and knowledge, and far less money than the above companies can out design and out build them?

> What makes you think that Telsa, a company with far less AI workers and knowledge, an far less money than the above companies can out design and out build them?

Presumably because Elon himself will be involved in the design, and Elon, as we all know, is one of the world's great thinkers. ;)

Elon is one of the worlds greatest talent poachers, and that is much better than being a great thinker.
Is he, though?

I recently spoke with someone who quit SpaceX because (among other reasons) they felt Elon was a meddling micro-manager. That's just one anecdote, of course, but the Internet is full of them, replete with summary firings (https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-elon-musk-ruthlessly-f...), worker safety issues (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/12/hundred...), and just general bullshit (https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/9e360m/elon...).

I don't deny that his public image, for years, was an overall positive one. I really enjoyed Jill Lepore's digging into it here: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/elon-musk-the-evening-rocket.

But it seems like people who worked with him knew, for a long time, that he was full of shit. And increasingly, the public seems to as well.

Do you mind explaining what makes him good at it? Pay? Atmosphere? Management style?

From what I heard about SpaceX it seems to be a place grads go to burn out while being paid below market rate simply because they're excited about the idea. Maybe that impression is wrong, so I'd like to hear other perspectives.

Interesting, what makes you think this?
The dirty little open secret with a lot of these platforms is the contract sizes, hardware costs, etc are so massive they come with multiple teams of dedicated engineers and internal expertise to get your application(s) up and running on them. Obviously these things are never quite "pull a docker container and run" and no one dropping eight-nine figures on these installs is going to do it without serious vendor backing and support.

It's part of the reason why AMD has had quite a bit of success here but is in single digit market share for "AI" otherwise.

Most people - even large orgs with thousands of GPUs - are so trapped in CUDA the theoretical on paper performance and cost benefits evaporate immediately when you spend all of your time trying to port everything over to the point you get equivalent performance and functionality.

Got a source for that?
The original tweet makes the claim, but the tweet seems prone to hyperbole as well.

https://twitter.com/SawyerMerritt/status/1696011140508045660

The original tweet quotes Elon Musk saying "Frankly...if they (NVIDIA) could deliver us enough GPUs, we might not need Dojo"