7 comments

  • nelaggy 15 minutes ago
    so if the moat isn't the model and the moat isn't the inference layer, i guess the moat is the hardware now? what does this mean for frontier labs?
  • npalli 1 hour ago
    Interesting, Amazon doing the same for AWS Trainium.

    https://github.com/aws-neuron/torch-neuronx

  • 23agt 37 minutes ago
    Google is selling TPU shovels via Cloud services and also physically to select partners. So this makes sense.

    There will be an abundance of shovels. Nebius already crashed by almost half from its hype peak.

    • airza 31 minutes ago
      it doesn't seem like there's an abundance of shovels coming anytime soon
  • yipinwong 57 minutes ago
    Dumb question from non-AI engineer.

    Is this somehow Google's answer to today's best DeepSeek open-sourcing inferencing engine?

    • bitpush 50 minutes ago
      I dont think big companies like Google react to news like that. Very likely this was meant to go out on Tuesday for weeks now. And it just happened to have coincided with another news.
    • JacobAsmuth 7 minutes ago
      Yeah they read the news this morning and whipped up a quick Torch->XLA translation layer and coordinated with four different inference engines (who also all wrote their own blog posts) and shoved this out the door quick to stay on top of the news cycle
      • mathisfun123 4 minutes ago
        they're releasing this today because the pytorch conf is this week...
    • Tanjreeve 45 minutes ago
      They do different things and sit in different parts of the stack (training vs inference). TorchTPU seems more like a play to get more people familiar with Googles TPU chips as they want to sell them to people outside of google.
    • mathisfun123 18 minutes ago
      lol no this is a replacement for https://github.com/pytorch/xla
  • Lucasoato 1 hour ago
    Are there TPUs outside Google Cloud?
    • boulos 56 minutes ago
      Yes. Google is famously selling TPUs on prem to big customers (e.g., Anthropic) and Crux AI is now a venture to do just that.
    • goda90 9 minutes ago
      Maybe just marketing, but they call the NPUs in their Pixel phones "TPUs"
    • sschueller 1 hour ago
      Google coral USB and m.2 devices are TPUs.
      • boulos 57 minutes ago
        Only in marketing name. They're not related otherwise.
    • westurner 1 hour ago
      TPU / neural compute accelerator / Math coprocessor;

      "OpenTPU: Open-Source Reimplementation of Google Tensor Processing Unit (TPU)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44111452

      From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45848676 :

      > How does Cerebras WSE-3 with 44GB of 'L2' on-chip SRAM compare to Google's TPUs, Tesla's TPUs, NorthPole, Groq LPU, Tenstorrent's, and AMD's NPU designs?

      There are TPUs made out of silicon carbide with standard fab.

      There is in-flight tensor processing with photons, but that's not quite a TPU.

      • hackernudes 6 minutes ago
        I think the commenter was asking if Google sells TPU chip hardware to use outside of Google's own infrastructure and cloud.
  • Androcles 59 minutes ago
    [flagged]
  • karansuthar 13 minutes ago
    [dead]