Shazeer: Deep Learning Succeeds Because Hardware Is Optimized for Dense Matrix Multiplication
Noam Shazeer · Noam Shazeer: How We Spent $2M to Train a Single AI Model and Grew Character.ai to 20M Users | E1055 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Aug 31, 2023 · at 34:24
Noam Shazeer, co-founder and CEO of Character.ai and former Google Brain researcher, discusses why initial attempts at sparse computation failed compared to dense matrix hardware acceleration.
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“The reason this whole field is working so well is because Now we have this magic hardware that's great at these dense matrix multiplications. And so you can do them like orders of magnitude faster than you can do anything that involves poking around in memory.”
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