Cerebras’ new monster AI chip adds 1.4T transistors
I’m bearish on new hardware for AI training. The most important thing is the software stack, and thus far everyone has failed to support pytorch in a drop-in way.<p>The philosophy here seems to be “if we build it, they’ll buy it.” But suppose you wanted to train a gpt model with this specialized hardware. That means you’re looking at two months of R&amp;D minimum to get everything rewritten, running, tested, trained, and with an inferencing pipeline to generate samples.<p>And that’s <i>just</i> for gpt — you lose all the other libraries people have written. This matters more in GAN training, since for example you can find someone else’s FID implementation and drop it in without too much hassle. But with this specialized chip, you’d have to write it from scratch.<p>We had a similar situation in gamedev circa 2003-2009. Practically every year there was a new GPU, which boasted similar architectural improvements. But, for all its flaws, GL made these improvements “drop-in” —- just opt in to the new extension, and keep writing your gl code as you have been.<p>Ditto for direct3d, except they took the attitude of “limit to a specific API, not arbitrary extensions.” (Pixel shader 2.0 was an awesome upgrade from 1.1.)<p>AI has no such standards, and it hurts. The M1 GPU in my new Air is supposedly ready to do AI training. Imagine my surprise when I loaded up tensorflow and saw that it doesn’t support any GPU devices whatsoever. They seem to transparently rewrite the cpu ops to run on the gpu automatically, which isn’t the expected behavior.<p>So I dig into Apple’s actual api for doing training, and holy cow, that looks miserable to write in swift. I like how much control it gives you over allocation patterns, but I can’t imagine trying to do serious work in it on a daily basis.<p>What we need is a unified API that can easily support multiple backends — something like “pytorch, but just enough pytorch to trick everybody” since supporting the full api seems to be beyond hardware vendors’ capabilities at the moment. (Lookin’ at you, google. Love ya though.)