Tensor Processing Unit, every mention
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Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:27 Ben Gilbert They're a chip company with their Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, which is the only real scale deployment of AI chips in the world besides Nvidia GPUs.
- ▶ 1:46:00 Ben Gilbert So enter, David, as you said, the tensor processing unit made just for neural networks that is far more efficient from GPUs at the time, with the trade-off that you can't really use it for anything else.
- ▶ 1:46:28 Ben Gilbert So the big idea behind the TPU, if you're trying to figure out, like, what was the core insight, they use reduced computational precision.
- ▶ 1:47:18 Ben Gilbert The whole thing is quite clever behind the TPU.
- ▶ 1:47:21 Ben Gilbert The other thing that has to happen with the TPU is it needs to happen now, because it's very clear speech to text is a thing.
- ▶ 1:47:49 Ben Gilbert So, the TPU was designed, verified, built, and deployed into data centers in 15 months.
- ▶ 1:48:19 Ben Gilbert The other thing they did is they fit the TPU into the form factor of a hard drive.
- ▶ 1:48:28 Ben Gilbert You just pop out a hard drive and you pop in a TPU without needing to do any physical re-architecture.
- ▶ 1:49:21 Ben Gilbert The other thing to know about the TPUs is they were done in time for the AlphaGo match.
- ▶ 1:49:25 Ben Gilbert So that match ran on a single machine with four TPUs in Google Cloud.
- ▶ 1:49:36 Ben Gilbert That's the TPU.
- ▶ 1:49:43 Ben Gilbert TPUs and GPUs look a lot more similar than they used to.
- ▶ 1:49:49 Ben Gilbert But today, Google, it's estimated, has two to three million TPUs.
- ▶ 1:50:14 Ben Gilbert The TPU is a giant deal in AI in a way that I think a lot of people don't realize.
- ▶ 1:50:44 Ben Gilbert And they built it in such a way that it doesn't just have to run on TPUs.
- ▶ 3:28:30 Ben Gilbert But in Google Cloud, you can use TPUs, which they make a ton of, and everyone else is desperately begging NVIDIA for allocations to GPUs.
- ▶ 3:28:41 Ben Gilbert So if you're willing to not use CUDA and build on Google stack, they have an abundant amount of TPUs for you.
- ▶ 3:37:30 Ben Gilbert When working with Google on the TPU versus Nvidia's 80%, but that's still a huge difference to play with.
- ▶ 4:04:16 Ben Gilbert To Jonathan Ross, original team member on the TPU, and today the founder and CEO of Grok, that's Grok with a Q, making chips for inference.