
Ex-Googlers left secretive AI unit to form Groq with Palihapitiya - coloneltcb
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/20/ex-googlers-left-secretive-ai-unit-to-form-groq-with-palihapitiya.html
======
mark_l_watson
Amazing not only in the speedup, but also in saving electricity.

Deep learning is changing the field of AI and I expect that with a few more
breakthroughs in training algorithms and hardware everything will start to
change, hopefully for the better. I wonder when we will see ultra low power
neural chips in cellphones.

In the 1980s, my team at SAIC built special purpose neural hardware: Harvard
memory architecture designed to run backprop quickly. We got 5 megaflops out
of our boards and we were happy enough.

~~~
highd
I don't think this will have anything to do with training, since it's the TPU
team and trying to beat nVidia at floating-point matrix multiplication doesn't
seem like a great idea. Run-time can generally be done with integer
operations, which is near dirt-cheap these days - I'd think the only
interesting things would be operating at server scales or so low-power that
you're getting 30FPS on your classification/segmentation what-have-you on your
smartphone without impacting battery life. My guess is the former, though I'm
not sure what the market size is for companies that need to evaluate their
machine learning systems at speeds fast enough to merit specialized hardware.

------
siculars
I don't quite understand how these xooglers can take any of that knowledge
with them and start a new company. Wouldn't everything they do be patent
encumbered? Sounds like a big fat unknown liability to me. Not to mention non
competes. What am I missing?

~~~
sp0rk
I recently read a Vox article that explained how California courts don't
enforce contracts that limit employee mobility (and partially explains why
behavior like this is possible):

[http://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/2/13/14580874/google-
self-...](http://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/2/13/14580874/google-self-driving-
noncompetes)

~~~
aarongolliver
Patent law =/= contract law. They're not referring to non-competes

------
hyperpallium
> the incumbents -- Intel, Qualcomm and Nvidia -- are massive, and Google,
> Apple and Amazon are developing their own silicon

I wonder if the death of Moore's Law finally opens the way for entrants.

~~~
deepnotderp
More importantly it's the death/slowing of Dennard scaling.

------
rayuela
With Nvidia pretty much a monopoly in the hardware space for deep learning I
think there is certainly a lot of room for disruption. Given that they've got
8 out of the first 10 members of the TPU team there might actually be a bit of
potential for this venture to succeed. I for one am happy to see some real
competition coming to this market.

~~~
jclune
A high tech incumbent with a monopoly doesn't scream opportunity to me. This
startup is brave AF, but definitely 8/10 from the TPU team have the best shot
of anybody.

------
jclune
Where do I apply?

