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0 pointsmodeless6y ago0 comments

> Google TPU TOS prohibits the use of TPUs for stuff that competes with Google

I don't think this is true. If you're talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19855099, it doesn't apply to TPU hardware, as is explained in the comments there.

> TPU-like stuff is ~10x the energy efficiency of GPUs

10x is probably overstating it when talking about newer GPUs because they have ML hardware in them now. Also, that still doesn't make it a good idea to build your own chips because there will soon be many third party options to choose from. Doing your own chips is a bet that you will out execute dozens of companies ranging from startups to industry giants. Simply taking your pick of the best commercially available options is likely to be a better choice in the near future.

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m0zg6y ago

Yep that's the clause. The clause itself is not that problematic for Tesla. What's problematic is that it can be changed over time, and it'd be foolish to single-source something as important as deep learning compute without the option to go elsewhere. Not to mention the rather extravagant Cloud pricing. So Tesla is taking a page out of Steve Jobs' playbook and it will control its own core tech. That's smart, especially considering that they already have bits and pieces of the IP that they'll need.

modelessOP6y ago

That clause doesn't apply at all though. It's not even for the same product.

As for single-source, the models are written in PyTorch, not TPU machine code, and they're pretty standard models anyway (e.g. Resnet-50). They can easily transfer to other hardware if necessary. There's not a ton of lock-in there. It doesn't justify the massive costs of ASIC development just to avoid this nonexistent lock-in and imaginary TOS clause.

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