Reiner Pope: belief

Transcript context

…This is getting us into... What is MatX? How did you guys start it, and which part of this space are you attacking? MatX is making the best chips physically possible for LLMs. What led us into MatX… Mike is the other founder. Mike and I were both working at Google. I was working on the inference stack for running LLMs, and I was saying, "How can we make the best software on TPUs for running LLMs?" Then what we really wanted out of hardware was support much, much larger matrices. The matrices have grown from maybe 128 in dimension into the many thousands. Truck goes to many trailers. Much larger matrices and much lower precision arithmetic. We tried to move the TPUs in this direction. TPUs have been moving in this direction, but they're constrained by a lot of other workloads. There was a big ads workload at the time. Back in '22, before ChatGPT was released, there was this idea that LLMs were going to be a big thing, but not conviction, and really hard to make a big bet on that. I think a startup is more of the right place to make a big bet on a workload. If you fail, it's fine. Another startup will succeed. Whereas I think a company like Google or NVIDIA, the next chip has to work for sure. You can take more technical risks as they turn up.…

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