Meta研究人员透露,Facebook自2020年起使用TPU训练AI,由Kaiming He领导开发TF和JAX代码库,MAE、DiT等模型完全基于TPU构建。因内部采用有限,Meta于2023年取消GCP协议。推文指出,Google、Anthropic等实验室长期使用TPU训练大模型,Nvidia的CUDA护城河并非不可逾越,OpenAI亦投资Triton寻求替代。TPU与GPU的效率差异并非关键,系统工程人才才是决定性因素。
何恺明团队2020年起用TPU训练MAE/DiT,Nvidia护城河比想象更浅
most of people didn’t know this we had been using TPUs at *Facebook* as far back as 2020. Kaiming led the initial development of the TF and JAX codebase, and research projects like MAE, MoCo v3, ConvNeXt v2 and DiT were developed *entirely* on TPUs.
because we were the only team at FAIR using them, Meta cancelled the GCP deal in early 2023.
TPUs also powered much of our large-scale work at NYU, including SiT, Cambrian1/S, and the recent RAE, FreeFlow.
took a lot of suffering to learn the infra (not what they signed up for, but my students are basically TPU/JAX/XLA pros now), but once you get there, the performance/stability is exceptional.
very optimistic about Google growing the TPU and JAX ecosystem and pushing it forward commercially
I keep seeing stuff about TPU, has anything materially new happened? There’s no evidence Google has ever trained a Gemini on non-TPU hardware, going years back to pre-GPT models like BERT. TPUs predate Nvidia’s own tensor cores. Anthropic (and Character, and SSI, and Midjourney, …) have long used TPUs, I’d be surprised if Meta *weren’t* looking at them. Nvidia’s moat has never been deep for the big labs - see OpenAI deciding it could do better than CUDA and investing in Triton instead, regularly edging out CUDNN on benchmarks. There is nothing magical or structural about any of this, just good engineers doing good work. TPUs are not all that more efficient than GPUs, and small perf/W differences are dwarfed by whether Meta has the right kernels / systems engineering talent to pull it off. Both Nvidia’s and Google’s moats are small and we still are at the point where individual good engineers can flip the entire balance. See old thread below. Was this just… not priced in? This is all super old public info.在 X 查看被引用的帖子
来源:Saining Xie · x.com