Reiner Pope of MatX on accelerating AI with transformer-optimized chips
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Raynard Pope is the cofounder and CEO of MathX. He's a former math whiz and Haskell programmer who became a TPU architect for Google, and now he's teamed up with Google's former chief chip architect to design a better chip for AI. So a year ago, everyone was saying, Google is canceled. You know, AI is going to eat their search. No one's going to search for things, therefore the business, you know, won't do well. Obviously, that sentiment has really shifted. Yeah. In part helped by, you know, Gemini three is really good. And then also, it's really fast. You know, it's powered by the custom chip
They started with the research, right? The transformers came from there. Pretty much anyone who's maybe, I don't know, over 30 and at a large lab has been at Google Brain at some point. So I think there's just, like, there was and has been a lot of talent there. TPUs are pretty good. I mean, we think there's better you can do, of course, but they at least had the opportunity to design the TPUs for neural nets, at least, rather than graphics applications like NVIDIA. And so the overall architecture, starting with single core, doing what was at the time reasonably large systolic arrays, by today
Wait, when did the TPU project start?
TPU v1 was announced in 2016, I think. That was what actually kind of led to the creation of all of those 2016, 2017
start
ups.
So Surumas, Grok,
Graphcore, SambaNova, all of those. TPU v1 actually was, I think, a really impressive project. It was done on a very short timeline, maybe, I don't know the full details, but maybe about a year or so, maybe a year and a half, with a skeleton team of twenty, thirty people. Really, really minimal viable product. More recent TPUs and more recent AI chips in general like can't do that because the market has moved and the stakes or the table stakes are much higher. But the first generation product, they just one big systolic array, stick a memory next to it, we're done. And it really simple, a nice
And obviously, TPU v1 predates the transformer. Is that just a coincidence that they happened at very similar times or Yeah. Related in some way?
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