[HN Gopher] Five Years of Tinygrad
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Five Years of Tinygrad
Author : iyaja
Score : 65 points
Date : 2025-12-29 17:12 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (geohot.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (geohot.github.io)
| mika6996 wrote:
| What would tinygrad replace if they continue to proceed like
| this?
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| Potentially PyTorch and Tensorflow.
| cyberax wrote:
| I think it has great potential for deployments on edge systems.
| vileain wrote:
| [flagged]
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| There are lots of bubbles where Elon is still king. Those
| bubbles are often void of deodorant.
| vileain wrote:
| Based on the response it appears HN is one such bubble.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| Elon spent billions to buy a platform and promote his
| tweets. He spent billions more to create a tweaked AI model
| that praised him like a mad king.
|
| He only has to spend a couple thousand a month to influence
| comment ranking on HN.
| mycodendral wrote:
| the value is the directness, not implied origination
|
| not everyone cares about playing voldemort
| vileain wrote:
| What is so aggrandizingly 'direct' about calling the system
| you are attempting to improve 'dumb'?
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't pick the most provocative thing in an article
| or post to complain about in the thread. Find something
| interesting to respond to instead._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| pa7ch wrote:
| Very weird to market this as subscribing to "Elon process for
| software"
|
| I remember when defcon ctf would play Geohot's PlayStation rap
| video every year on the wall.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| I hate it when 'inspirational' quotes are attributed to the
| person with the largest audience and not the people who came up
| with it, like in this case, the engineers at Lockheed's Skunk
| Works.
| piskov wrote:
| You would be amazed
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ
| ramesh31 wrote:
| It's an apocryphal quote.
|
| "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there
| is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to
| take away."
|
| - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
| deburo wrote:
| So this is all python? I bet Chris Lattner probably approached
| them.
| zephen wrote:
| Lattner is a smart guy, but I think Mojo might be the wrong
| direction.
|
| Time will tell.
|
| History has not so far been kind to projects which attempt to
| supplant cPython, whether they are other Python variants such
| as PyPy, or other languages such as julia.
|
| Python has a lot of detractors, but (despite some huge missteps
| with the 2-3 transition) the core team keeps churning out stuff
| that people want to use.
|
| Mojo is being positioned "as a member of the Python family"
| but, like Pyrex/Cython, it has special syntax, and even worse,
| the calling convention is both different than Python, and
| depends on the type of variable being passed. And the
| introspection is completely missing.
| tucnak wrote:
| Honestly, I feel like Julia might as well beat Mojo or sommat
| to the punch, sooner or later. It has some facilities and
| supporting infrastructure for a lot of scientific and data-
| handling tasks surrounding ML, if not for compiling and
| dispatching kernels (where XLA reins supreme to anything in
| the CUDA ecosystem!) For example, Bayesian programming like
| Turing.jl is virtually unmatched in Python. It's been a while
| since I looked at Lux.jl for XLA integration, but I reckon it
| could be incredibly useful. As long as LLM's and RLVR
| training thereof should continue to improve, we may be able
| to translate loads of exiting Pytorch code eventually.
| paxys wrote:
| Lots of words and weird analogies to say basically nothing.
|
| What is the status of the project? What can it do? What has it
| achieved in 5 years?
|
| But no, let's highlight how we follow the "Elon process".
|
| As a side note, whenever someone incessantly focuses on lines of
| code as a metric (in either direction), I immediately start to
| take them less seriously.
| jszymborski wrote:
| From [0]:
|
| "When we can reproduce a common set of papers on 1 NVIDIA GPU
| 2x faster than PyTorch. We also want the speed to be good on
| the M1. ETA, Q2 next year."
|
| [0] https://tinygrad.org/#tinybox
| dewey wrote:
| Using lines of code as a metric for productivity is bad. Using
| it to show how simple something is, or how a refactor removed x
| lines of code that doesn't need to be maintained any more isn't
| such a bad thing I'd say.
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| TFA includes a time measurement though, and 5 years for
| 18'935 SLOC doesn't scream quite "how simple something is".
| alphazard wrote:
| Yeah this is exactly right, if you can trust the contributors
| to not code-golf or otherwise Goodhart the LoC metric, then
| it's a reasonable measure of complexity.
|
| It doesn't work as well when you start mixing languages, or
| generating code.
| selkin wrote:
| Less LOC also doesn't imply simplicity: just look at the
| demoscene, which often has the former but not the latter.
| piskov wrote:
| He was able to run nvidia gpu on mac via thunderbolt with
| tinygrad.
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/tiny-corp-su...
|
| --
|
| Check tinygrad's twitter account for specifics if you want to
| catch up on progress
| timzaman wrote:
| Fell bad for geohotz. Such a lovely guy, i hope he strikes it
| right soon
| still-learning wrote:
| Seems like he's doing fine, why do you feel bad for him?
| still-learning wrote:
| >People get hired by contributing to the repo. It's a very self
| directed job, with one meeting a week and a goal of making
| tinygrad better
|
| I find this organizational structure compelling, probably the
| closest to reaching 100% productivity in a week as you can get.
| ttul wrote:
| I wonder what happened to George's old policy of requiring
| everyone to move to San Diego?
| georgehotz wrote:
| That's comma.ai's policy since they make hardware and solve
| physical problems. The tiny corp has been hybrid (remote-
| first) since day 1 because it primarily writes open source
| software, and there's a long track record of success with
| remote for this kind of task.
|
| We have a few whole-team meetups in Hong Kong each year for
| 2-4 weeks, and there's a San Diego or Hong Kong office that
| anyone can work from as they choose. We also have a wide
| array of fancy multi GPU boxes that everyone on the team gets
| full access to (known external contributors can get some
| access also).
|
| I think many companies that were quick to embrace remote have
| walked it back, not everyone is capable of working
| productively remotely, nor are all types of work amenable to
| remote.
| measurablefunc wrote:
| Is it really "Complex"? Or did we just make it "Complicated"? -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY
| alphazard wrote:
| Programming a GPU in 2025 is complex, that might be because it
| has been made complicated, but regardless, it is not complexity
| that this project can control.
|
| The fact that it competes with PyTorch in so few lines speaks
| to the incredibly low incidental complexity imposed by
| Tinygrad.
| alphazard wrote:
| > To fund the operation, we have a computer sales division that
| makes about $2M revenue a year.
|
| What's the margin on that? Do 5 software engineers really subsist
| on the spread from moving $2M/yr in hardware?
| piskov wrote:
| George raised $5.1M in 2023 for Tinygrad
| piskov wrote:
| > tinygrad is following the Elon process for software. Make the
| requirements less dumb. The best part is no part.
|
| That's not Elon. See Russian TRIZ
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ
| geremiiah wrote:
| The risk for Tinygrad is that PyTorch will create a new backend
| for Inductor, plug in their AMD codegen stuff and walala, PyTorch
| still king. I mean, they could have easily just taken that route
| themselves instead of bothering with a new ML framework and AD
| engine. 99% of the work is just the AMD codegen part of the
| compiler.
|
| Either way, super cool project and I wish them the best.
| ellis0n wrote:
| The main risk is that an LLM will rewrite itself and
| programmers will no longer be needed. I worked a bit with
| tinygrad and it looks quite amusing I managed to run it right
| away and make fixes in one of the tasks, but I decided not to
| commit because I was afraid of rejection. For example, the
| tasks are strange: $500 for two months, optimizing H.265,
| something that only a small group of people in the world can
| do.
|
| The SV is a unique place where you can meet Geo and get $5M,
| maintain a bunch of hardware, build a framework in 20,000 LOC
| and everything works well.
| peter_d_sherman wrote:
| >"We also have a contract with AMD to get MI350X on MLPerf for
| Llama 405B training."
|
| Anything to help AMD (and potentially other GPU/NPU/IPU etc. chip
| makers) catch up with NVidia/CUDA is potentially worth money,
| potentially worth a lot of money, potentially worth up to
| _Billion$_...
|
| Why?
|
| If we have
|
| a) Market worth _Billion$_
|
| and
|
| b) A _competitive_ race in that Market...
|
| then
|
| c) We have _VALUE_ in _anything_ (product, service, ?, ???) that
| helps any given participant capture more of that market than
| their competitors...
|
| (AMD (and the other lesser known GPU/NPU/IPU etc. chip vendors)
| are currently lagging behind NVidia's CUDA AI market dominance --
| so anything that helps the others advance in this area should,
| generally speaking, be beneficial for all technology users in
| general, and be potentially profitable (if the correct deals
| could be struck!) by those that have the skills to do such
| assisting...)
|
| Anyway, wishing you well in your endeavors, Tinygrad!
| semiquaver wrote:
| Is this the guy who talked a big game about all the things he was
| going to fix at Twitter, then utterly failed when confronted with
| a real world codebase and gave up having done nothing of use?
| piskov wrote:
| He left after realizing nothing was going to change.
|
| Also half-joked how the good food went away.
|
| --
|
| George is many things but not a quitter (see commai for
| example).
|
| If someone could pull this, it's him due to "never give up,
| never surrender" attitude.
|
| The shit with nvidia just needs to stop
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(page generated 2025-12-29 23:01 UTC)