Five Years of Tinygrad

(geohot.github.io)

44 points | by iyaja 3 hours ago ago

24 comments

  • paxys an hour ago ago

    Lots of words and weird analogies to say basically nothing.

    What is the status of the project? What can it do? What has it achieved in 5 years?

    But no, let's highlight how we follow the "Elon process".

    As a side note, whenever someone incessantly focuses on lines of code as a metric (in either direction), I immediately start to take them less seriously.

    • jszymborski an hour ago ago

      From [0]:

      "When we can reproduce a common set of papers on 1 NVIDIA GPU 2x faster than PyTorch. We also want the speed to be good on the M1. ETA, Q2 next year."

      [0] https://tinygrad.org/#tinybox

    • dewey 14 minutes ago ago

      Using lines of code as a metric for productivity is bad. Using it to show how simple something is, or how a refactor removed x lines of code that doesn’t need to be maintained any more isn’t such a bad thing I’d say.

      • alphazard 2 minutes ago ago

        Yeah this is exactly right, if you can trust the contributors to not code-golf or otherwise Goodhart the LOC metric, then it's a reasonable measure of complexity.

        It doesn't work as well when you start mixing languages, or generating code.

      • whilenot-dev 9 minutes ago ago

        TFA includes a time measurement though, and 5 years for 18'935 SLOC doesn't scream quite "how simple something is".

  • still-learning 42 minutes ago ago

    >People get hired by contributing to the repo. It’s a very self directed job, with one meeting a week and a goal of making tinygrad better

    I find this organizational structure compelling, probably the closest to reaching 100% productivity in a week as you can get.

    • ttul 28 minutes ago ago

      I wonder what happened to George’s old policy of requiring everyone to move to San Diego?

      • georgehotz 17 minutes ago ago

        That's comma.ai's policy since they make hardware and solve physical problems. The tiny corp has been hybrid (remote-first) since day 1 because it primarily writes open source software, and there's a long track record of success with remote for this kind of task.

        We have a few whole-team meetups in Hong Kong each year for 2-4 weeks, and there's a San Diego or Hong Kong office that anyone can work from as they choose. We also have a wide array of fancy multi GPU boxes that everyone on the team gets full access to (known external contributors can get some access also).

        I think many companies that were quick to embrace remote have walked it back, not everyone is capable of working productively remotely, nor are all types of work amenable to remote.

  • measurablefunc 27 minutes ago ago

    Is it really "Complex"? Or did we just make it "Complicated"? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY

  • pa7ch 2 hours ago ago

    Very weird to market this as subscribing to "Elon process for software"

    I remember when defcon ctf would play Geohot's PlayStation rap video every year on the wall.

    • spiderfarmer an hour ago ago

      I hate it when ‘inspirational’ quotes are attributed to the person with the largest audience and not the people who came up with it, like in this case, the engineers at Lockheed’s Skunk Works.

  • mika6996 2 hours ago ago

    What would tinygrad replace if they continue to proceed like this?

    • spiderfarmer an hour ago ago

      Potentially PyTorch and Tensorflow.

  • deburo 2 hours ago ago

    So this is all python? I bet Chris Lattner probably approached them.

    • zephen an hour ago ago

      Lattner is a smart guy, but I think Mojo might be the wrong direction.

      Time will tell.

      History has not so far been kind to projects which attempt to supplant cPython, whether they are other Python variants such as PyPy, or other languages such as julia.

      Python has a lot of detractors, but (despite some huge missteps with the 2-3 transition) the core team keeps churning out stuff that people want to use.

      Mojo is being positioned "as a member of the Python family" but, like Pyrex/Cython, it has special syntax, and even worse, the calling convention is both different than Python, and depends on the type of variable being passed. And the introspection is completely missing.

  • timzaman an hour ago ago

    Fell bad for geohotz. Such a lovely guy, i hope he strikes it right soon

    • still-learning 38 minutes ago ago

      Seems like he's doing fine, why do you feel bad for him?

  • vileain 2 hours ago ago

    [flagged]

    • dang 43 minutes ago ago

      "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."

      https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

    • mycodendral an hour ago ago

      the value is the directness, not implied origination

      not everyone cares about playing voldemort

    • spiderfarmer an hour ago ago

      There are lots of bubbles where Elon is still king. Those bubbles are often void of deodorant.

      • vileain 43 minutes ago ago

        Based on the response it appears HN is one such bubble.

        • spiderfarmer 24 minutes ago ago

          Elon spent billions to buy a platform and promote his tweets. He spent billions more to create a tweaked AI model that praised him like a mad king.

          He only has to spend a couple thousand a month to influence comment ranking on HN.