boonhet comments on OpenAI Hoarding Tens Of Thousands Of Apple Mac mini And Mac Studio Devices, As ASUS And MSI Burn Through Their Entire First Batch Of NVIDIA RTX Spark Chip And Beg For More.

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 16 points 1 month ago (8 children)

Rosetta 2 is irrelevant here because they'd just compile their shit for ARM for better performance.

At least unlike B300s, these can one day be used if OpenAI dumps them on the used market. IF they do that instead of trashing them to make sure everything stays expensive.

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[–] eurodyne@piefed.world 1 point 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (7 children)

True, but getting there probably involves using Rosetta 2 to arrive at a solution for taking full advantage of the Apple Silicon SoC memory exchanges and other Apple proprietary stuff. Those chips aren’t bog-standard ARM chips and the Asahi Project (bless their hearts) have barely broken into the M3 chips— so… if OpenAI are leveraging Apple Silicon from the last year or 2, they’re building out their own solution using Rosetta as some sort of bridge.

Edit: which also means they must be getting help from Apple directly, ew. And that really pisses me off, because I have long maintained that Rosetta should be open-sourced.

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[–] GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago (6 children)

I don't understand why Rosetta has to be involved in any way at all.

Apple provides APIs for programming low level GPU instructions, including AI workloads, on their chips, using the Metal API. Anyone interested in using Apple hardware to its full potential can just write Mac-native software, same as any other MacOS native software directly compiled as binaries to run on Mac M series chips. No Rosetta required for translating x86 instructions to ARM, when the whole thing compiles for Apple's native instructions in the first place.

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[+] eurodyne@piefed.world -6 points 1 month ago* (5 children)

Uhh, you’re skipping a few steps

Steps that either would not work between architectures or that Rosetta would handle (thereby answering your own question)

And I’m not here to teach a computer science class

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[–] GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago (1 child)

Steps that either would not work between architectures or that Rosetta would handle (thereby answering your own question)

What? They would compile the code that they control for the M-series architectures. The target architecture is M-series ARM chips running on MacOS.

Rosetta is for translating x86 to ARM. Which wouldn't be necessary because there are no x86 binaries involved at all.

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[–] eurodyne@piefed.world 1 point 1 month ago*

Oh, I guess you’re right about that

My mistake

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[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

No, @GamingChairModel@lemmy.world is right.

What does Rosetta have anything to do with what OpenAI needs? Machine learning on Macs is done in MLX or something else with Metal, running OSX. Most agenic frameworks or other ML-related infrastructure are just Python, or open code that can compile on OSX/Macs just fine. In fact, OSX is often the first target platform.

This even includes inter-node frameworks for clustering Macs together.

No one doing "AI" on Macs is using Rosetta. There's no point, and its a bad idea. They're doing everything in OSX, which works fine, and I can't imagine what OpenAI would be doing with them that wouldn't work in OSX.

But maybe I'm missing what you're implying here. And I'm sorry to come off as thorny, but condescending comments like "I’m not here to teach a computer science class" rub me the wrong way.

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