SambaNova chip for LLMs nearly as fast as Groq (opens in new tab)

If the crypto wave was any indication, llm asics will gain popularity as general purpose devices like Nvidia gpus get phased out.

I'm hoping the rise of Asics leads to hardware agnostic representations of ML models, or at least seamless conversion from Cuda to other target hardware.

With LLMs standardizing around known instructions, I'm bullish about this family of hardware. Now, they may just get acquired given the infinite money Nvidia has. But, I see their IP being valuable by itself.

I've used Groq, and it's been one of my few 'oh wow' moments of the recent llm cycle.

This offers no insight into the architecture of either system or the chips they developed. Also, why would I want to access their stack and have them use my queries as training data?

I see nothing from either Groq or SambaNova that says that they will distribute dedicated inference chips in any other form than full data centers. If I can't slot it into my machine, is it real? How exactly are these companies envisioning the future of inference? As a walled corporate garden where we pay them with our thoughts code low complexity tasks and small change so they can cement their hold on our material lives and make themselves indispensable as they imperceptibly shape our outcomes? At least Tenstorrent is selling something I could slot, although I don't think they are at the point where it makes sense to do so

When you're competing with NVIDIA, 'nearly as fast' as the next best competitor is not going to cut it. I wonder what part of the market they're looking for here.

Never got my verification link. Maybe it’s because I used + notation

Can this be mass produced?