Replace AI in your comment with "intern" or "junior employee" and you will quickly realize that it needs a different set of skills. Do you think two different managers can achieve wildly different results with the same team by using different processes and style of communication? That's the value of learning this skill.
If only 10% of Tax software users are affected, IRS may not give an extension and the customers would be cursing you. Probably worth it to keep those extra engineers on call during the tax season.
Yes: to specialists that have typically another 5 years of formal education on top. They do not refer patients for relatively trivial topics covered in the first year of a bachelor‘s degree.
Ah, so the cryptography involved in authentication schemes is a first year CS trivial task. Hashing, salting, optimization, defending against side-channel attacks, looking for backdoors introduced by state actors, developing standards used by the strongest militaries on the planet that protects literally enough nuclear weapons to destroy all life on the planet, that's old news by week 3 of the course at any community college. The folks who went overboard with those Phds in cryptography or became specialists in elite OpSec or post-quantum cryptography really did waste their time and money, and someone should tell the CIA they don't need to go hunting for the best cryptography hackers on the planet, just grab a year one CS brogrammer and they can totally make sure all is secure in the ToR network.
Tell you what. I'll never become a specialist if you never become a doctor. I'd rather you not refuse to admit that there are better doctors for a task than you if my health is in your hands.
It's a policy based on unsound reasoning. Why is India treated as a monolith when it is more diverse than the EU in terms of linguistic and cultural diversity? If tomorrow India magically broke off into 30 separate states, all the same people who have been waiting for decades would be immediately eligible for green cards. How does it make any sense?
That is exactly what diversity is when it comes to immigration, the freaking yearly green card lottery has diversity in the name of the program https://www.usa.gov/green-card-lottery
And yet the tech industry is far from diverse. It is predominantly male, white, and Indian. Did the US H1B program have an effect on this? Were some groups squeezed out even more from the tech industry due to H1B? For example, would there be more Black people in the tech industry without the H1B? More women?
Chegg wasn't a victim — it was a middleman profiting from locked-up educational content and exploiting students’ needs. ChatGPT didn't "lure" users; it provided a superior, accessible alternative, democratizing learning rather than hiding it behind paywalls. The argument against AI due to resource usage is selectively blind to the inefficiencies of legacy systems like Chegg. Calling this hype is like dismissing the internet as a fad — it’s a failure of imagination. Disruption always displaces incumbents, but clinging to outdated, exploitative models is far worse than embracing a tool that genuinely empowers users.
They had no real original content of their own, just worked solutions to homework problems they pulled from textbooks. They were good at SEO and would appear at the top. You clicked on it because it lied to you: showing you part of the content you wanted. Just enough for the search engine preview. That probably boosted them further, wasting more time by others tricked by the same fake results.
To see the rest of the answer, they wanted you to pay money and hope it was what you wanted. Who would subscribe to that other than students desperate for homework answers?
Then ChatGPT comes in without any of the scammy tactics. Sure, it's often wrong, but so are Chegg and Quora.
Considering that each kernel / kernel size is usually custom tuned on NVIDIA, I'd say no. Working in this field at several different companies, there are likely thousands of hand-tuned variations of a simple GEMM kernel. Each one required an engineer to look at specifically, even if they're all variations on a common theme.
As far as I know (and again, I work in the field of AI compilers), we're still a ways off from complete end-to-end generation of highly optimized kernels. If you want it to go fast, you need to write it by hand [1], and then test and validate.
Moreover, chip makers are constantly adding new features (Tensor Cores in NVIDIA for example), so the compiler is always playing catch up and at some point an engineer has to sit down (likely a team of them) and think 'what's the best way to exploit this hardware functionality for software performance?'. Then they have to test and validate that, and then either write a kernel, or attempt to put that know-how into a compiler.
Multiply this times the number of kernels in a typical suite, and... yeah.
And that was my point about herculean effort on modern chips. Assembly language isn't just the old 'Add register 1 and 2 and dump in R3' anymore. It's 'Use this instruction to access memory in this way, so that it's in a compatible format for the next instruction' and 'oh yeah, make sure your memory synchronization primitives are such that the whole thing is coherent'. Good luck!
Even going one step up into a higher-level language, you have to know how the kernel gets compiled to make it worthwhile. Again, it is trivial to write a correct opencl matrix multiply, but that's never going to be the highest performance. You have to know the hardware intimately. This is where having the software co-designed with hardware is very important. Basically, every AI chipmaker of any importance does this, including the startups, like Groq and Cerebras.
[1] A lot of kernels share basic patterns, so its not as hard as it sounds, but definitely requires engineering effort to get the design right.
> Considering that each kernel / kernel size is usually custom tuned on NVIDIA, I'd say no. Working in this field at several different companies, there are likely thousands of hand-tuned variations of a simple GEMM kernel. Each one required an engineer to look at specifically, even if they're all variations on a common theme.
Lol that's absolutely not true. What you're describing is literally impossible for any company that has more than one product family on the market since each product has different scratch sizes, number of vector registers, data types supported/emulated etc.
Outside of trade show demos, kernels are codegened. What is true is there are recurring "themes/patterns" that are handled by engineers for a class of products. Lately this is flash attention...
> Again, it is trivial to write a correct opencl matrix multiply, but that's never going to be the highest performance.
I guess you work at AMD. The reason AMD ships a whole bunch of binary kernels is not because someone tuned/designed each one but because AMD doesn't have a PTX/SASS equivalent. So each kernel has to be compiled at build time for each device (it's also why they can't have LTS support for architectures).
> outside of trade show demos, kernels are condegened. What is true is there are recurring "themes/patterns" that are handled by engineers for a class of products. Lately this is flash attention
I never said they weren't using code generation. I said that each one requires a manual tune. You will set various parameters, determine if the generated code does well enough and then if there's performance to squeeze out, you modify the code generator.
They require one person or team to engineer and then a whole bunch of people to use...? That doesn't resemble in the least what you were describing where each kernel is hand-tuned for each shape and device. But please do continue to insist you're still somehow right
Sigh. I use to be an engineering manager for a kernels team. I think I know what I'm talking about. Yes, each kernel is paid individual attention to even if many are basically the same and require little rework. It's a lot of work. Now I work as an ic in the same field . I don't need to insist I'm right because it's what I do all day
I work in DB kernels, everything gets hand tuned as there is economic reason for hand tuning it. The expectation in many of these systems is that there are no wasted cycles. You can codegen a decent kernel, but then someone will find a better approach - do you want the slower version of the product, or the faster one?
You can see this in action with matrix math libraries, folks have been hand tuning those for decades at this point.
Your claim is that there are automated methods (which I mentioned in my original post) to manage the complexity. My claim is that it requires a large team of engineers working on it. I'm not really sure what you think you've refuted.
1000 engineers don’t automatically crank out 50x more code than 20 engineers. But GP is just saying there are a lot of subcomponents involved that each need major engineering effort dedicated to them.
I see it less as an engineering problem and more as a market problem. AMD stuff has existed, it’s the market that doesn’t see a point in it, and at this point, even feature parity or CUDA compatibility for that matter won’t make a huge dent. People will just keep using what they know and are recommended.
It’s more amazing to me that NVDA is so intensely inflated by this LLM hype wave. I find it genuinely scary to think about what’s going to happen when 95+% of AI slopware startups fold. Nvidia won’t be the only company financially impacted. Our entire economy runs on fads.
Your conclusion does not follow from your premise. AI moderation should easily catch the worst offenders and the most obvious ones. The examples you gave easily stand out from non-offensive content and are easy to catch with high confidence. So, human moderators will have to look at where AI has low confidence classifying the content. In fact, AI will reduce the likelihood of human moderators ever seeing traumatic content.
So what? Maybe there would have been multiple island nations, maybe they all would have seen other countries and joined hands together. Why should the Dutch get any say in what modern Indonesia should look like?
Same goes for the parent comment about India. The decline of the Mughal empire and the possibility of multiple states arising instead of an unified India doesn't justify the British colonialism and in no way absolves them of their atrocities.
