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#model#models#weights#more#hardware#chip#fast#still#sota#something

Discussion (116 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

LarsDu88•about 1 hour ago
I'm surprised neither OpenAI nor Anthropic made this move first. The Chinese open weight models are pulling ahead and commoditizing their value proposition.

Baking models onto silicon would've been the next logical move to get a moat.

Google is already doing this and has an experimental project on top of already having TPUs and cramming their quantized flash onto individual TPUs for inference.

anthonypasq•25 minutes ago
Personally I think Apple should have acquired them. if you could burn a gemma4 class model into an iphone and actually get extremely low latency and low battery usage it would feel like the future IMO. even if it means you wont get frontier intelligence, there might actually be incentive to buy a new mobile device every year again.
adgjlsfhk1•9 minutes ago
I don't think this works out from a cost/silicon perspective. Small models already run pretty well in software (since the weights fit in cache) and big models require silicon area proportional to the size of weights. On a mobile device putting a chip like this is competing directly in BOM and power against a whole lot more l3 cache, and the l3 cache makes everything faster
bsaul•22 minutes ago
That's actually a really good point... There's currently zero incentive to buying more hardware, and that's one very good reason do have a new one.
superb_dev•13 minutes ago
From what I remember, these chips are not mobile size yet
bradfa•10 minutes ago
A small model would be. I think that’s more the point. It’s definitely not SOTA but it’s fast and energy efficient and local.
moshun•35 minutes ago
Considering the rate of model development and rail hopping, seems like baking models into silicon is speed-running obsolescence.
breuleux•1 minute ago
If you’re only running models for frontier capabilities, yeah. For tasks where current models are smart enough, running them 100x faster is the most impactful improvement you can make. Consider all the things you could use a model for, but don’t, because the latency is just a bit too high.
topspin•3 minutes ago
"seems like baking models into silicon is speed-running obsolescence"

Now maybe. When models are flying passenger aircraft, other prerogatives will assert themselves. When a 50TB ROM means you can impulse purchase a ChatGPT 6.3 xhigh that runs on batteries, yet more use cases will be apparent.

mdp2021•15 minutes ago
Compute the cost of producing n of them devices, imagine a fair price based on that, and see if that local, blazing fast card* can be an asset that could be replaced periodically.

*(It's local: private files managing firm oriented. It's blazing fast: it can be placed into recursive, intensive local workflows.)

alightsoul•10 minutes ago
Which is exactly what companies and shareholders want to increase sales.
amelius•28 minutes ago
Not sure. You can fix the transistors but leave the connections between them open for flexibility, so you only need to change the manufacturing process for the upper masks for every new model.
tsujamin•5 minutes ago
Surely that added flexibility negatively impacts the density/parameter count of the model you could etch?
sroussey•23 minutes ago
Or do a hybrid
ray_v•26 minutes ago
I could see this making sense when model development start to settle down ... it's going to settle down, right? ...
flyinglizard•14 minutes ago
Look at it the other way: compared to the cost of training a model, the cost of making a custom ASIC is trivial.
alightsoul•11 minutes ago
Because Openai and anthropic are not hardware companies. They outsource that to Broadcom and AWS' Annapurna labs.
mrtksn•18 minutes ago
Isn’t that kind of useless for the stock? It sounds complicated, unlike having number of CPUs go up.

It’s like talking about anything else than Megapixels when everyone was convinced that megapixels must go up in certain periods of the smartphone boom.

karmasimida•19 minutes ago
A model can't be updated, and a chip that is only relevant for 6 months at max?
askvictor•11 minutes ago
People already buy new phones every year, this just creates even more reason to do so
LPisGood•35 minutes ago
I’m surprised Nvidia hasn’t partnered to make a Claude chip yet. It’s a win/win you can license them out, sell them when they become obsolete, etc.
wolttam•23 minutes ago
It's a terrible moat. You etch the silicon then nobody wants to run it in 6 months because models have advanced that much further.
ux266478•10 minutes ago
It's a fantastic business opportunity to sell local models though. Sell a proprietary PCIe inference ASIC that accepts a ROM daughterboard holding a model. You don't actually need the compute of 8 flagship GPUs for inference. The name of the game has been the terabytes of memory. Move to an old node like 28nm and you sidestep supply chain issues and have a massively affordable product. Gut tells me you'd be able to turn a tidy margin selling those daughterboards at a couple hundred bucks.

Update the model? Customers have to buy the new daughterboard, giving you a persistent income stream. Update the meta-architecture? You sell a new ASIC. Congratulations, you now dropped the capex for trillion-parameter models down from the price of a house, to the price of a normal computer peripheral.

nine_k•16 minutes ago
Not so if it's embedded in something smart enough for its intended purpose.

Think vision, spatial reasoning, speech synthesis, even some speech analysis. Think self-driving cars (and drones) that need 10x less power for the brain, and can think at 10x situation per second.

speed_spread•18 minutes ago
If a model is good enough today, it's still gonna be good enough in a year. Except you'll be able to serve it 1/100 of the price. Or 100x the speed.
bamboozled•27 minutes ago
It googles models suck
whythismatters•about 2 hours ago
walrus01•41 minutes ago
I know it's a relatively tiny model, but damn, is that thing fast.

It also mostly passes the "schlong" test

https://pastes.io/YcxSi8Fp

AussieWog93•19 minutes ago
I read the paste, it got the etymology wrong, no? Schlong comes from shlang (snake), not shlemp (is this even a word? I don't speak Yiddish but couldn't find it on Google).

Oxford also claim that its first recorded use was from the 60s, not the 20s; https://www.oed.com/dictionary/schlong_n?tl=true

walrus01•4 minutes ago
It did get it wrong but it also got a lot farther than much more recent, but worse models like 6.7GB on disk size ternary bonsai. It at least knows it's from Yiddish. The "schlemp" appears to be a total hallucination or it's confusing it with schlep, which is not related to schlong. One of the reasons why I said it "mostly" passes the test. Something much larger on the size of qwen 3.5 122B, deepseek v4 flash or similar that runs in 120GB to 190GB of RAM in my experience will answer perfectly unless it has been ruined by something like Q2 quantization.
thoughtpeddler•37 minutes ago
I didn't realize there was a SchlongBench™ (but of course there is). What's it test? (asking seriously)
walrus01•34 minutes ago
There isn't SchlongBench(TM) yet, it's a specific question I've been asking of differently sized models as a randomly chosen gauge of how much less commonly used knowledge is perma-baked into it. In this case a question about a specific yiddish origin slang term. Small/bad models don't know it's from middle high german or Yiddish and get its origin and meaning totally wrong (or it runs into model censorship related to slang related to the male anatomy).

It's also a question I have found will cause models that don't know what it is to go off quickly in a direction of hallucination trying to explain it, so the hallucination is evident very quickly starting from the first ever prompt issued with 0 context fill. Example: I had a model write four detailed supposedly-accurate sounding, grammatically correct paragraphs saying its origin is from AAVE (African American Vernacular English), which it most certainly is not

You could do the same by picking any topic that is very rarely discussed in conversation, some esoteric and narrow piece of knowledge and asking the model about it.

wxw•about 1 hour ago
I freakin' love this demo. It feels magical.
VBprogrammer•36 minutes ago
I had the same reaction but then I showed it to my partner. She completely didn't get it, in her words "how can it be thinking of a good answer when it's that quick?"

I tried to explain but I fear were probably going to be adding artificial sleeps to these things to convince the masses it's doing something clever.

axus•9 minutes ago
I asked it some old hardware command line questions I'd recently asked Gemini, it hallucinated parts of the answer.

The characters in the 3-act Shakespearean play had very little depth, many of the names were similar, and they were not very smart, but the simple plot was cohesive.

varun_ch•14 minutes ago
to be fair, the model used for Chat Jimmy is not very smart, but the world where it is smart is very interesting.

It’s going to be really crazy when the bottle neck for agents is the speed of the tool calls rather than the speed of inference. Imagine an agent interacting with the terminal near instantly…

senderista•38 minutes ago
Wow, feels like Google web search in 1999.
joshvm•5 minutes ago
If you still want the experience, go and browse McMaster Carr. Wizards designed that website.
hendurhance•40 minutes ago
I understand the appeal due to the speed
itvision•about 1 hour ago
OMFG this thing is fast.
phoh•22 minutes ago
its fast but try to get it to give you pi to 50 decimal places. it didnt go well for me.
walrus01•19 minutes ago
I think the same exact model running on CPU-only and RAM, or a small GPU, would do about the same? It's quite an old model now and small, you could throw a GGUF into llama-server or something for a side by side comparison.

https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B

As I remember just about any english language model from mid 2024 and earlier didn't even do well if you asked it to count sequentially from 0 to 100, nevermind calculating stuff.

nsxwolf•about 1 hour ago
It doesn’t believe it’s running on that chip, it’s arguing with me
shaewest•about 1 hour ago
It's running a very small, non-reasoning model at the moment. But more generally, almost all LLMs argue on the hardware/model they are/are on.
metadat•44 minutes ago
What would tokens/sec performance look like for a reasoning model? An order of magnitude slower?
dumberquestions•about 1 hour ago
Which model? Or how many active parameters?
mikeayles•about 1 hour ago
AMD could have saved their money and used their own hardware! I've got a language model doing 60k tok/s on AMD hardware already, a Xilinx Kria K26 SOM, with the weights baked into URAM/BRAM with zero DRAM in the token loop. Same thesis as Taalas: single-stream decode is bandwidth bound, so stop fetching weights from far away.

Caveats stacked high, obviously. It's 3.16M parameters (tinystories, and I also have a kevin-speak lemmatised version), the tokens are characters, and the 60k record is 16 streams that each remember exactly one token of context, so it's blisteringly fast at saying nothing. The honest build with full context and KV caching still does ~19k tok/s on one stream though.

I keep messing with the blogpost with the live demo, but I'm planning on flipping it to live in the next day or two

tandr•about 1 hour ago
Well, technically it is their hardware now...
questionableans•38 minutes ago
And their team, if they treat them well.
nojs•38 minutes ago
Can anyone comment on the economics and likely turnaround times of this process, when it’s more mature?

Would it be realistic for a frontier lab to deploy this or would the turnaround time mean the model is always too out of date?

Assuming the weights and architecture are eventually stable, how much cheaper would this end up being?

2001zhaozhao•31 minutes ago
There are always uses for outdated models.

Claude Code is still using haiku 4.5 from ages ago for explore subagents for instance. Not to mention production uses like customer service that only need to be "good enough"

alightsoul•8 minutes ago
Customer service has really degraded huh. 4 years ago they expected opus performance out of human call center agents

I guess losing some customers due to poor customer service is ok if the price of customer service is right.

edot•24 minutes ago
Just looked this up, no longer true. Explore subagents inherit whatever model the parent is. And you can of course make other subagent configs.
samtheprogram•17 minutes ago
That's solely so that you burn more money. It's totally unnecessary to assume the parent model. Sure, it could be upgraded from Haiku if there was a solid reason to, but...
AussieWog93•14 minutes ago
I mean, if you could get Opus or even Sonnet 4.5 at 1000+ tok/s exploring the codebase, they would probably change that setting back.

But either way, I think GP's overall sentiment of "delegating intelligence-saturated tasks to an outdated but fast subagent" makes a lot of sense.

cogman10•12 minutes ago
2 to 3 months optimistically assuming everything goes smoothly and is fully automated.

6 months or even a year if something goes wrong in the fabrication process and you need to update things.

If they do more standard asic design, it could be a lot longer as the design needs to be validated on an FPGA cluster, which would necessarily need to be very big for something like a LLM. Easily up to 2 years.

There's a reason chatjimmy isn't demonstrating newer models and why they only show of an 8B model.

shangofox•30 minutes ago
I mean even if it take a few months, it'll still be out of date. But there was a hypothetical when it came up in Feb, would you want Qwen 3.5 at like 10k tokens per second.

At the time people were no doubt saying yes but now 3.8 is out, is that still desirable?

xienze•14 minutes ago
There's soooo much stuff that such a model is still capable of doing in the pursuit of getting a better overall answer. Imagine a powerful research agent that blasts out dozens of the small, cheap models to fetch and summarize one page each. Then the beefy researcher model performs the final analysis.
A_D_E_P_T•about 1 hour ago
This is probably a win-win. The team gets paid, and we get greater assurance that their best ideas and architectures -- which are truly impressive -- are going to see the light of day in actual products.
badatnames•about 1 hour ago
They were too small for this to be a meaningfully sized purchase for AMD, there's real risk they get sucked into a team that ultimately delivers sqat, not to mention the chances of anything being delivered in an even remotely consumer-priced bracket are definitely out the window
proxysna•about 2 hours ago
Really hoped to see their hw out in the wild one day
syntaxing•about 1 hour ago
Honestly, this is starting to make more and more sense. SOTA models are starting to converge to certain architecture and capabilities. I wouldn’t be surprised we end up with a base model ASIC + “fine tune” card where it’s a physical LoRA style adapter.
encyclopedism•about 1 hour ago
Imagine a multi-modal model with 1000's of tokens per second. Realtime inference for a host of applications. This is a BIG deal and will change the landscape in unfathomable ways.

The https://chatjimmy.ai demo was impressive.

Once models settle down this makes sense. Imagine a cartridge with a physical model on it. You purchase a cartridge and stick it in your computer/phone/server. Want to upgrade? By a new 'cartridge'.

This should bring inference cost down dramatically, I wonder how OpenAI/Anthropic feel about that.

2001zhaozhao•29 minutes ago
i'm looking forward to Qwen3.8 27B launch to see how much models have peaked at a given size.

it might already be time to start burning the best small models onto hardware since it's possible they can't get much better at many tasks like knowledge recall due to the inherent information density limits for models at a given size.

anthonypasq•21 minutes ago
very interesting idea. i didnt think of that. i was just assuming youd have an additional one of these in your phone for actual lightning fast local inference
Grosvenor•38 minutes ago
> Imagine a cartridge with a physical model on it.

I can finally have my own Dixie flatline. Cool.

mdp2021•6 minutes ago
> Dixie Flatline

In case some did not know: also the movie (or TV series?) is finally happening.

# Neuromancer - Official Teaser https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49055037

breadislove•17 minutes ago
we have not converged at all, if you look at how different the chinese models in terms of architecture you can guess that the labs are experimenting a lot as well. we are seeing all different types of hybrid architectures, different attention methods and so on. Of course on a high level its still a transformer but if you take a proper look we are seeing more divergence then a convergence.
kevin_thibedeau•about 1 hour ago
Then we can have machine psychologists pull cards when they run anok.
VladVladikoff•about 1 hour ago
Wouldn't this mean someone with sufficient hardware could lift the SOTA model weights off the chip? Or are you saying that these chips would only be used internally by these companies and not sold to the public?
dumberquestions•about 1 hour ago
I wouldn't expect companies not sharing their weights today to be any more likely to share them if they're on hardware, this doesn't sufficiently hide weights from a local user.
snek_case•about 1 hour ago
The weights are very unlikely to be on the chip itself. That wouldn't work for SOTA models that are terabyte scale, even quantized. This is probably an accelerator for specific kernels in the model, but the weights are likely loaded from memory. The chip may have SRAM to store some of the weights temporarily during inference.
foltik•6 minutes ago
At least in the case of Taalas the weights are physically encoded directly on the chip.

It’s composed of 4-bit multiplier cells that compute all 16 possible results in parallel. The top metal wiring layer physically selects the one that corresponds to a multiplication with that cell’s constant weight, and route it to the next layer.

syntaxing•about 1 hour ago
I don’t get why this is an issue? You can run Claude/OpenAI SOTA models through Amazon bedrock. These weights have to live somewhere to run on Bedrock.
amazingamazing•about 1 hour ago
One idea would be to use an open model.
smokel•about 1 hour ago
The technical aspects of SOTA models are not publicly documented. How do you know if something is converging?
syntaxing•about 1 hour ago
SOTA American models are not. SOTA Chinese models are. From a physics aspect, closed source models cannot be too far from open source ones in terms of size. There’s only so much you can squeeze out a B100 style cluster even with fancy Dflash style diffusion model for the speculative model.
_aavaa_•about 1 hour ago
If we had deepseek v4 flash 0731 etched on a chip it would be more than capable enough and fast enough for so many people's needs, even hardcore engineer.
nurumaik•about 1 hour ago
Will be capable and fast enough for 2-3 weeks until new sota drops
cyanydeez•about 1 hour ago
if they were still exponentially increasing, they wouldn't be preparing for an IPO. IPO is where companies go to die and founders escape.
walrus01•37 minutes ago
Having a base model ASIC as a physical piece of hardware makes me think of the early days of microcomputer desktop stuff where having a socketed ROM or PROM was a key piece of hardware, and people actually knew/cared what ROM was on their system's motherboard.

Imagine if like instead of having a specific Mac Plus ROM, you had a thing that looks like a fat ASIC that can hold models sitting on a slotted daughtercard directly next to the CPU and RAM.

cyanydeez•about 1 hour ago
I don't think there'll be a fine tune card; you'll have the base model vintage whatever year, and then your GPU will do whatever LoRA layers you want it to do; the LoRA will wrangle older dated models into the current of whatever your looking at.

But yeah, for things like programming, if it can do linux and python and some go and sql and javascript, larger domains can be threaded with LORA

badatnames•about 2 hours ago
Well so much for that dream.

Guess we can look forward to picking these up ex-enterprise on ebay for under $5k a pop in a decade or two

bhouston•about 1 hour ago
Toronto Canada startup btw.
kridsdale1•about 1 hour ago
Works well, I remember driving by the ATI building as a kid.
cmrdporcupine•about 1 hour ago
Seems to be somehow some kind of offshoot from or connected to Tenstorrent, which is just down the road. Founder looks like he was/is maybe at Tenstorrent and previously associated with Keller?

Always fantasize about applying at Tenstorrent, but wrong side of Toronto. 2 hour commute.

tecoholic•18 minutes ago
With web search and tool call a decent current generation model at the speed of the chatjimmy could do a lot. People saying it would be out of date are missing the point. It’s not going to make much sense for frontier companies that’s chasing the SOTA. But for a lot of business use cases if someone can put GLM 5.2 and sell it as a box, it would make so much sense.

My partner has been asking for a “completely private” model for doing research and shifting through volumes of data that can’t leave the office and $$$ for the current hardware makes no sense. It would be an easy sell if someone walks in with a black box that contains “ChatGPT”.

cephei•8 minutes ago
There are so many use cases for supremely fast offline models. The first thing that comes to my mind is for real-time video processing or other non-textual content in real time.
equinumerous•15 minutes ago
100% agree - you don't need the most up-to-date model to have something that's useful in agentic contexts. They could even produce chips with weights that make all the decision making/logical reasoning and have it delegate to other specialized agents. If it becomes cheap enough to print a run of custom chips, releasing a batch for each major advancement does not seem unreasonable for SOTA companies.
MarkWayneNewton•about 2 hours ago
While this design is self-limiting I think its a good approach. It doesn't take an entirely new architecture or infinite memory to produce significant performance improvement.
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andrewvl•27 minutes ago
It must be a “super model”. What will be if new model released? New chips?
bob1029•about 1 hour ago
I feel like NAND process tech could become useful at solving some of these problems. A GPU where you can update the weights a few thousand times may be sufficient.
mdp2021•39 minutes ago
The basis of Taalas is "compute in memory" electronics - past Von Neumann's separation of processor and memory.

You need to be able to add|mul where the data (the weights) are stored.

addaon•about 1 hour ago
NAND hasn't been scaling great lately. It seems like PCM or MRAM would both be better fits.
kridsdale1•about 1 hour ago
FPGA model storage?
rvz•about 2 hours ago
Didn't even give them a chance to launch the hardware.
ycui7•about 1 hour ago
so qwen3.x-27b on hardware? or better deepseek-v4-flash on hardware .
ilaksh•about 1 hour ago
I wrote them an email asking for PrismML Bonsai 27b Ternary which is like 6b or something crazy small and would be a lot easier for them to do initially.
mdp2021•25 minutes ago
They were specializing their forthcoming system on 4-bit FP - which I understand is a structural decision.

Bonsai Ternary (1.7bits/weight) is a compromise, compromise that has to make sense in the context - efficient when translated into transistors.

fellowniusmonk•about 1 hour ago
Token quantity will have a quality all its own.
walrus01•44 minutes ago
Imagine the size of chip needed to 'etch' something like Qwen 3.6 27B in size.
golem14•28 minutes ago
Interesting thought, because it's a yield question. How tolerant are models today to a few broken weights.

If tolerant, they could churn out many cheaper chips, some perhaps with slight abnormal tendencies ;)

thepasch•15 minutes ago
> How tolerant are models today to a few broken weights.

Extremely! You can remove entire layers and the model will still work just fine, with barely perceptible capability losses.

I've cut/bypassed ~15% of total parameters out of Gemma 4 31B on a pod once. Still got perfectly coherent responses out of it. Certain layers are a lot more important than others, particularly early and late ones; but it's honestly astonishing how much can be cut out from the middle without destroying the model's coherence.

I didn't run any meaningful benchmarks, so I have no idea what the capability loss looks like exactly. But "produce coherent and sensible English in response to a wide variety of prompts" was definitely not among the things the model unlearned.

walrus01•24 minutes ago
I wonder if you had a few percent of problems in the yield, if it would be functionally equivalent to the difference between a unsloth-published Q6 standard size GGUF vs. the nearly perfect precision of an unsloth Q8-K-XL. Or more like Q4 vs Q8 where a lot is lost.
mdp2021•34 minutes ago
Not too dissimilar to the first HC1 (6nm 815mm² 53B Transistors embedding an 8b LLM):

> Our second model, still based on Taalas’ first-generation silicon platform (HC1), will be a mid-sized reasoning LLM

flog•35 minutes ago
If someone has that sort of knowledge; how big a chip would be required? Is it possible?
mdp2021•30 minutes ago
Well, given the data above, roughly a 220b transistors chip for the HC1 tech.