george hotz archive
11 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2023–2024
5:33:21 · 95K views · Jun 4, 2023
A long George Hotz live-stream from June 2023 in which he works on tinygrad and rants about AMD's drivers, ultimately declaring he is giving up on AMD. It also touches on hardware and compiler topics.
Mostly cited as the source of Hotz's AMD driver rant, which some commenters found validating and others found unflattering.
11 comments from Hacker News
He flamed out, then is back after Lisa Su called him (lmao) [LINK] this video [LINK] [LINK] On a personal level that youtube doesn't make him come off looking that good... like people are trying to get patches to him and generally soothe him/damage control and he's just being a bit of a manchild. And it sounds like that's the general course of events around a lot of his "efforts". On the other hand he's not wrong either, having this private build inside AMD and not even validating official, supported configurations for the officially supported non-private builds they show to the world isn't a good look, and that's just the very start of the problems around ROCm. AMD's OpenCL runtime was never stable or good either and every experience I've heard with it was "we spent so much time fighting AMD-specific runtime bugs and specs jank that what we ended up with was essentially vendor-proprietary anyway". On the other other hand, it sounds like AMD know this is a mess and has some big stability/maturity improvements in the pipeline. It seems clear from some of the smoke coming out of the building that they're cooking on more general ROCm support for RDNA cards, and generally working to patch the maturity and stability issues he's talking about. I hate the "wait for drivers/new software release bro it's gonna fix everything" that surrounds AMD products but in this case I'm at least hopeful they seem to understand the problem, even if it's completely absurdly late. Some of what he was vi
So for reference, this geohot is George Hotz who has a company Tiny Corp [0] in the space. Among a long list of things, he had a moment in the spotlight recently for a long rant [1] where he "gave up on AMD" because their drivers sucked more than he expected. The situation is reasonably complex - AMD have some programmers working on ROCm who seemed to be operating at standard fare when that is really not what AMD needs right now (I personally, suspect there is/was a PM in a key position who didn't "get it", although I am not sure what it is either). As far as I know it got the attention of Lisa Su. I'm cheering him on, even though his complaints were a little melodramatic. My experience is the driver technically supports everything I could possibly want. The problem is if I spend an evening trying to do anything with OpenCL or ROCm the kernel hard-locks and I go to bed early. If the problem inside is what it looks like from the outside (repeating myself, a key manager somewhere just doesn't get the space) they really need some pressure from grumpy customers like George to realign their software development process. That context might be related to this particular case. I see a suspicious folder called "crash" in this repo. [0] [LINK] [1] this video - as I recall he ran the demo suite and it crashed.
They're talking about the meltdown he had on stream [1] (in front of the mentioned pirate flag), that ended with him saying he'd stop using AMD hardware [2]. He recanted this two weeks after talking with AMD [3]. Maybe he'll succeed, but this definitely doesn't scream stability to me. I'd be wary of investing money into his ventures (but then I'm not a VC, so what do I know). [1] this video [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]
> according to George Hotz In this video from June, George Hotz says to go with "3090s over 4090s. 3090s have NVLink... 4090s are $1600 and 3090s are 750. RAM bandwidth is about the same." Has he changed his recommendations since then? this video
Here is a timestamped clip of George Hotz Twitch stream from 6 days ago making the same point about rationalizing his own emotional state of powerlessness in Industrial Society and its Future this video