From my own experience, models are at the tipping point for being useful at prototypes in software, and those are very large frontier models not feasible to get down on wafers unless someone does something smart.
I really don't like the hallucination rate for most models but it is improving, so that is still far in the future.
What I could see though, is if the whole unit they made would be power efficient enough to run on a robotics platform for human computer interaction.
It makes sense they would try to make repurposing their tech as much as they could since making changes is frought with a long time frame and risk.
But if we look long term and pretend that they get it to work, they just need to stay afloat until better smaller models can be made with their technology, so it becomes a waiting game for investors and a risk assessment.
If it's not reprogrammable, it's just expensive glass.
If you etch the bits into silicon, you then have to accommodate the bits by physical area, which is the transistor density for whatever modern process they use. This will give you a lower bound for the size of the wafers.
This can give huge wafers for a very set model which is old by the time it is finalized.
Etching generic functions used in ML and common fused kernels would seem much more viable as they could be used as building blocks.
If you etch the bits into silicon, you then have to accommodate the bits by physical area, which is the transistor density for whatever modern process they use. This will give you a lower bound for the size of the wafers.
Thanks, I learned something, but the original point stands, 5 people is still not a lot and well within the scale where you could manage things within the team yourself without dedicated management and have first hand information flow.
And Unix was mainly made by two people, it's astounding that as I get older, even tech managers don't know "the mythical man month", and how software production generally scales.
Rust is a good candidate, but it lacks some crucial aspects when it comes to what I would consider 'nice to haves' from a modern language in this territory.
While rust has traits, borrowing etc, it doesn't have a lot of things with regard to types and optimization. Things like:
- A lack of GADTs, or a stronger version, dependent types, or similar type system which would allow one to encode natural relationships, recursive ones, invariants etc.
- Tail call optimization guarantees, to allow for mutual recursion and optimization since game engines are just huge state machines, and it would allow to pass functions around which could call each other via mutual recursion, while allowing it to be optimized as well.
- Efficient structural sharing of immutable state, which would be memory layout and cache friendly
- Built in profiling from the getgo which the language developers would use and refine, so you could get information about how the program behaves over time and space.
I'm looking forward to the day where an ml/functional inspired language can be used for real time rendering and game engines, how far are we from that?
Realistically, one could argue it's not the right choice overall, but still, it's an application which would push the boundaries of what those languages have been perceived to have the greatness weakness in. An application which is mostly about handing mutable state with high performance.