[robot]

"it’s not that hard for a customer to get their software working on a competing hardware platform and cut out a bunch of Nvidia’s enormous markup"

Agree and yet none of the contenders were able to work out their software play (Intel, AMD, chip startups) for more than a year which shows how corporates move slow.

Google is not selling their TPUs AFAIK and their tooling is completely focused on internal use.

So really interesting to see no one else is properly addressing the need even though they have chips (and the chip itself is much simpler than a cpu, a systolic matrix multiplier array).

[amluto]

I’m not taking about the chip suppliers moving fast. I’m talking about the users. For example, here’s Stability pulling it off:

https://stability.ai/news/putting-the-ai-supercomputer-to-wo...

I’m sure this was a lot of work, and Intel surely helped a lot, and there are probably plenty of kludges involved. But it worked, and there’s a lot of money on the table to do things like this.