Advice to Tenstorrent
22 comments
·May 25, 2025htrp
Has geohot done anything since the original iphone jailbreak?
The ventures he has started (I can think of tinygrad and comma ai) all seem like half finished tech demos.
roenxi
[delayed]
moralestapia
He's the founder of comma.ai
Edit: you edited your comment after I told you he made comma.ai.
Bit dishonest, but whatever, I wouldn't describe comma.ai as a "half finished tech demo" but you're allowed to your own opinion about it.
IncreasePosts
I thought George was going to save AMD. Now he's saving tenstorrent? Busy guy!
moralestapia
geohot has a loud mouth ... but he has earned the cred and walks the walk.
I wish there was a thousand more geohots than all the mediocre middle-managers at AMD or tenstorrent; or people who have never done anything beyond posting snarky comments in online forums.
Aurornis
> geohot has a loud mouth ... but he has earned the cred
Sadly, I think geohot is an example of someone who earned some cred for impressive accomplishments in the past and then tried to cash in that cred over and over again in unrelated future domains.
His brief and very public flame out at Twitter after mysteriously abandoning another project and the bold claims about his AMD work that never really translated to anything have really detracted from whatever past “cred” he built up. I really hope he can find a new niche and succeed, but until then it might be time to lie low on social media and avoid throwing more mud.
moralestapia
>geohot has a loud mouth ... but he has earned the cred
>I think geohot is an example of someone who earned some cred for impressive accomplishments in the past [...]
Huh? Yeah, that's what I wrote.
add-sub-mul-div
Don't forget he was also going to save Twitter but noped out after a few weeks.
henning
Maintaining and improving existing software sure is boring and often thankless compared to starting flashy new projects where you get to make and understand all the major decisions up front.
imtringued
I think he is right about AMD but completely misses the mark when it comes to tenstorrent. He is ranting about exponential linear unit (elu), which hardly seems to be something that could possibly hold an AI company back. If the hardware is running and training models reliably, then it's just a matter of pricing to stay competitive. Poor optimization cuts your margins, but the incentives are aligned.
With AMD the experience is so poor that you have to save the company from itself if you want to make progress.
latchkey
People refuse to believe it, but the AMD experience is getting better every day by leaps and bounds. Over the last few months, there is a brand new focus on improving the software. There is still a long way to go, but the company is absolutely trying to save itself.
modeless
He's not ranting about ELU. He's using ELU as an example of something that shouldn't be in the lower abstraction layers.
throwaway314155
Guy would really benefit from learning some manners. Just comes across as painfully toxic no matter how correct he is.
edit: For what it's worth, if you can't see that this language is rude or think it is somehow acceptable for people of a certain caliber to talk this way - you're also probably toxic.
Havoc
Well he called sony fudge packers in a youtube rap dis track after they sued him so I wouldn't hold my breath on that one
bigyabai
With all due respect Mr. Geohot, you've got an awful lotta nerve to throw stones from your glass house. This guy needs to drop the middle school tough-guy tone and post numbers. The central thesis of this article is sound, lead with it:
> You aren't going to get better deals on tapeouts/IP than NVIDIA/AMD. You need some advantage.
> If you want a dataflow graph compiler, build a dataflow graph compiler.
Now explain why. Clearly Tenstorrent is happy to build Yet Another Abstraction Layer, so instead of bullying them over it you should at least attempt to actively humiliate them for the approach. You know, produce some manner of evidence that vindicates your position instead of relying on your authority alone. Jim Keller has no reason to take this seriously, even if you're right.
Without any numbers this feels like one cult of personality trying to bait another into a shit-flinging contest as a marketing scheme. We've seen this happen several times before on Hacker News, and it doesn't end up with either side making an Nvidia-killer. This is not a model for productive discourse.
RealityVoid
I think you're right, mostly, but... While I'm sure Jim Keller will make great silicon, I'm not sure how good he's going to be at shaping the SW platform thing. I hope he will, I'm rooting for him, but I feel that this might be a novel challenge for him.
Geohot is abrasive to say the least, and, no, this is not a model for productive discourse(I'll try not to bring in some of his hot takes on the stream because giving them stage is probably also not productive) But I do think he has good taste in SW and he might be right about the number of layers of abstraction.
For context, geohot wrote this live on a twitch stream.
Havoc
>This guy needs to drop the middle school tough-guy tone and post numbers.
Pretty sure comma is profitable? Not particularly, but for a hardware startup selling multiple iterations and not getting wrecked is a sound start
coolThingsFirst
This guy is insufferable. He failed his internship at Twitter and was asking questions about it publicly but has a strong opinion on everything and is an expert on everything tech related.
fadfsdfaes
[flagged]
I'm doing my PhD in ML shit. Before that I was a systems programming guy, lots of C++, bit of CUDA, big fan of Rust. On the side I'm obsessed with RISC-V. Own a couple of boards. I made a stupid little cuda-like-compiler on top of the RISC-V vector extensions, just for fun.
What I'm saying is, tensorrent couldn't find a more excitable third-party developer if they grew one in a lab. And you know what? I can't make heads or tails out of all their various abstractions. I've tried! I've read the docs, I've read the examples, I've gone to meetups. I think OP is right that "one more abstraction bro" probably doesn't solve the problem.
At a guess, the problem isn't a technical one, it is an organizational one. They don't have anybody to stand in for me, or devs like me (eg dumb people). There is no product leadership on the API design. Just a lot of really brilliant engineers obsessively tuning for their own usecases, unwilling to ever trade-off a hit in performance or expressivity for readability or writeability.