Electrical engineer here. I read the publicity statement, and from my point of view it is both (a) a major advance, if true, and (b) entirely plausible. When you switch from a programmable device (e.g. GPU) to a similarly sized special purpose ASIC, it is not unreasonable to pick up a factor of 10 to 50 in performance. The tradeoff is that the GPU can do many more things than the ASIC, and the ASIC takes years to design. They claim they started design in 2022, on a transformer-only device, on the theory that transformers were going to be popular. And boy, did they luck out. I don‘t know if other people can tell, but to me, that statement oozes with engineering glee. They’re so happy! I would love to see a technical paper on how they did it.
Electrical engineer here. I read the publicity statement, and from my point of view it is both (a) a major advance, if true, and (b) entirely plausible. When you switch from a programmable device (e.g. GPU) to a similarly sized special purpose ASIC, it is not unreasonable to pick up a factor of 10 to 50 in performance. The tradeoff is that the GPU can do many more things than the ASIC, and the ASIC takes years to design. They claim they started design in 2022, on a transformer-only device, on the theory that transformers were going to be popular. And boy, did they luck out. I don‘t know if other people can tell, but to me, that statement oozes with engineering glee. They’re so happy!
I would love to see a technical paper on how they did it.
Of course they may be lying.