bcatanzaro

"A founder-engineer driven company. Facebook is one of the few Big Tech firms whose founder is an engineer, and still is the CEO. Netflix is the other one where founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings was also a software engineer before starting the company. Amazon was the other example of this until recently, but it’s not the case at Google or Apple."

So funny how people overlook Jensen Huang repeatedly. As if NVIDIA wasn't big tech, or Jensen wasn't a founder, or an engineer...

I have been in an SF muni car with someone actively smoking something that was not marijuana or a cigarette. I think it was fentanyl but I’m not sure. This was about two years ago. I hope this is tolerated less now than it has been.

Underrated comment

OMG

Yes

Nemotron has two reasons to exist, both of which are strategic to NVIDIA.

1. Help NVIDIA design future systems for AI by more deeply understanding what it takes to build AI.

2. Keep the AI ecosystem strong and diverse throughout the world by providing AI infrastructure that many companies can innovate on.

This is not a science project, nor is it for the joy of giving something away. Both of these reasons are core to NVIDIA.

Some of these concerns are precisely why we are building Nemotron at NVIDIA. We want to make it possible for people to invent and deploy AI in all sorts of new and unforeseen ways.

Nemotron is:

1. Not just open weight, but open data (to the limits of what is feasible), open recipe, open technique

2. In the future built by a coalition of organizations coming together to build great openly developed AI.

Nemotron 3 Super is our most successful model yet. [1]

Ultra is coming soon. And then Nemotron 4.

We can afford to do this because when AI grows, NVIDIA's opportunity also grows.

[1] https://kaitchup.substack.com/p/the-fastest-and-cheapest-120...

AI is a mirror. If you are boring, you will use AI in a boring way.

sadly, disembodied brains are not very useful. embodied brains require a civilization's worth of energy consumption and environmental impact in order to do their work. so we really need to take the world's power/water/carbon impact (divided by the world population) to talk about how much power it takes for a human brain to solve a problem.

As I said - anything surprisingly gluten free or surprisingly vegan is going to be UPF.

Sometimes I wonder if the gluten free trend is a ploy by food processing companies to whitewash expensive proprietary processed foods as “whole”.

Agreed. Which makes the statement “ultraprocessed foods should be treated more like cigarettes” seem wrong.

I guess “bad foods should be treated more like cigarettes” is too obvious.

Most of the things on sale at “Whole Foods” are ultra-processed these days. Anything that requires effort to make gluten free or vegan for example. Like impossible burger. Extreme ultra-processed. Or gluten free bread.

Please don’t tell me impossible burger patties are like cigarettes.

The Nano model isn’t pretrained in FP4, only Super and Ultra are. And posttraining is not in FP4, so the posttrained weights of these models are not native FP4.

I had a similar experience. The "Sanctus Sanctus Sanctus" written in stone was not an aspiration or a motto for me when I visited, it was a statement of fact.

I've often wondered if Intel would still be a dominant force in computing if it had kept engineering in Silicon Valley. I worked at Intel both in Hillsboro and in Santa Clara and I feel that Intel's decision to put so much engineering in Oregon was done to insulate them from the pressures of Silicon Valley. They didn't have to pay very well, and they had a very insular culture - because they could afford it. They didn't have to work very hard to keep engineers at Intel because their engineers were basically trapped in beautiful Oregon and generally wouldn't consider moving back to expensive California.

Housing costs in the Bay Area are soul-crushing, but they do motivate people to work on the highest value projects because complacency just doesn't usually work if you're trying to buy a house. And so I wonder, if Intel had kept their workforce mostly in California, could they have stayed a dominant force in computing?

Yes, but Italy had to centralize its language in order to accomplish this. 1000 Italian dialects were suppressed in a very heavyweight process. (And probably some people didn't like speaking Florentine, which became modern Italian.)

English is complicated because it's decentralized and there is no authority to regularize it. Which is a feature, not a bug.

English pronunciation does vary quite widely and it would be difficult to rewrite all the books and websites into all the different accents.

It's also decentralized - there's no authority to tell the English-speaking community how to spell things or how to say things.

I think these are both advantages that outweigh the phonetic inconsistency.

I'm curious about the False Positive/False Negative rate of the battitore. Do they open up some wheels to double check?

It means “envy” in Latin and Spanish etc. Which is why the logo is an acid green evil eye. And why NVIDIA’s headquarters are two buildings named “ENdeavor” and “Voyager”.

I almost want to read it as satire. Especially juxtaposed against his death. Because the ideas of "What I cannot create, I do not understand." and "Know how to solve every problem that has been solved" seem profoundly unwise and endlessly futile.

So surprising to me that GM’s most successful EV in some ways is sold by Honda.

“The team looked for a fermenting agent that could remain reactive in substances with a temperature of up to 370 degrees Celsius and alcohol of the recommended 16 percent per volume.”

My guess is that the reporter forgot a decimal point and meant 37.0 degrees Celsius. Because finding a yeast that actively metabolizes sugar at 370 degrees Celsius might be somewhat challenging.

They often flew mail on it as their cargo. But the plane was more a matter of national pride than something that made sense.

This is a strange blog post. Their tables say:

Cerebras yields 46225 * .93 = 43000 square millimeters per wafer

NVIDIA yields 58608 * .92 = 54000 square millimeters per wafer

I don't know if their numbers are correct but it is a strange thing for a startup to brag that it is worse than a big company at something important.

This is amazing. Thanks for posting.

Anyone else found it odd that the article says "For all the improvements evident in contemporary surgical technology, electron microscopic images actually confirm that the edge of Neolithic obsidian blades exceed today’s steel scalpels in sharpness" and then cites a paper about obsidian blades from 1982?

Has there been no improvement in sharpness in 42 years? Or are Neolithic obsidian blades just that much sharper?

I may be the only person who loves LilyPond but I really do love it. The LaTeX of music notation.

I feel like I pay a lot for news. I pay for: * WSJ * NYTimes * Economist * LATimes * SJ Mercury News * Apple News

And yet I constantly run into paywalls (which I circumvent). How much per month does the news industry think is fair for me to pay?

I wish I could just pay a fee per article I read. I think the business model is broken because there are too many individual entities and they all want a subscription. And this makes no sense in the age of the internet.

This is why my next car won’t be a Tesla (after driving one for the past 8 years). It’s sad, they get so many things right but they are dangerously irresponsible.

Maybe the best benefit of LLM as a search engine is that they haven't figured out yet how to serve you 10 ads before they give you the link.