Lots of words and weird analogies to say basically nothing.
What is the status of the project? What can it do? What has it achieved in 5 years?
But no, let's highlight how we follow the "Elon process".
As a side note, whenever someone incessantly focuses on lines of code as a metric (in either direction), I immediately start to take them less seriously.
Using lines of code as a metric for productivity is bad. Using it to show how simple something is, or how a refactor removed x lines of code that doesn’t need to be maintained any more isn’t such a bad thing I’d say.
Yeah this is exactly right, if you can trust the contributors to not code-golf or otherwise Goodhart the LoC metric, then it's a reasonable measure of complexity.
It doesn't work as well when you start mixing languages, or generating code.
That's comma.ai's policy since they make hardware and solve physical problems. The tiny corp has been hybrid (remote-first) since day 1 because it primarily writes open source software, and there's a long track record of success with remote for this kind of task.
We have a few whole-team meetups in Hong Kong each year for 2-4 weeks, and there's a San Diego or Hong Kong office that anyone can work from as they choose. We also have a wide array of fancy multi GPU boxes that everyone on the team gets full access to (known external contributors can get some access also).
I think many companies that were quick to embrace remote have walked it back, not everyone is capable of working productively remotely, nor are all types of work amenable to remote.
I hate it when ‘inspirational’ quotes are attributed to the person with the largest audience and not the people who came up with it, like in this case, the engineers at Lockheed’s Skunk Works.
Programming a GPU in 2025 is complex, that might be because it has been made complicated, but regardless, it is not complexity that this project can control.
The fact that it competes with PyTorch in so few lines speaks to the incredibly low incidental complexity imposed by Tinygrad.
Lattner is a smart guy, but I think Mojo might be the wrong direction.
Time will tell.
History has not so far been kind to projects which attempt to supplant cPython, whether they are other Python variants such as PyPy, or other languages such as julia.
Python has a lot of detractors, but (despite some huge missteps with the 2-3 transition) the core team keeps churning out stuff that people want to use.
Mojo is being positioned "as a member of the Python family" but, like Pyrex/Cython, it has special syntax, and even worse, the calling convention is both different than Python, and depends on the type of variable being passed. And the introspection is completely missing.
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
Lots of words and weird analogies to say basically nothing.
What is the status of the project? What can it do? What has it achieved in 5 years?
But no, let's highlight how we follow the "Elon process".
As a side note, whenever someone incessantly focuses on lines of code as a metric (in either direction), I immediately start to take them less seriously.
From [0]:
"When we can reproduce a common set of papers on 1 NVIDIA GPU 2x faster than PyTorch. We also want the speed to be good on the M1. ETA, Q2 next year."
[0] https://tinygrad.org/#tinybox
Using lines of code as a metric for productivity is bad. Using it to show how simple something is, or how a refactor removed x lines of code that doesn’t need to be maintained any more isn’t such a bad thing I’d say.
Yeah this is exactly right, if you can trust the contributors to not code-golf or otherwise Goodhart the LoC metric, then it's a reasonable measure of complexity.
It doesn't work as well when you start mixing languages, or generating code.
Less LOC also doesn't imply simplicity: just look at the demoscene, which often has the former but not the latter.
TFA includes a time measurement though, and 5 years for 18'935 SLOC doesn't scream quite "how simple something is".
He was able to run nvidia gpu on mac via thunderbolt with tinygrad.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/tiny-corp-su...
—
Check tinygrad’s twitter account for specifics if you want to catch up on progress
>People get hired by contributing to the repo. It’s a very self directed job, with one meeting a week and a goal of making tinygrad better
I find this organizational structure compelling, probably the closest to reaching 100% productivity in a week as you can get.
I wonder what happened to George’s old policy of requiring everyone to move to San Diego?
That's comma.ai's policy since they make hardware and solve physical problems. The tiny corp has been hybrid (remote-first) since day 1 because it primarily writes open source software, and there's a long track record of success with remote for this kind of task.
We have a few whole-team meetups in Hong Kong each year for 2-4 weeks, and there's a San Diego or Hong Kong office that anyone can work from as they choose. We also have a wide array of fancy multi GPU boxes that everyone on the team gets full access to (known external contributors can get some access also).
I think many companies that were quick to embrace remote have walked it back, not everyone is capable of working productively remotely, nor are all types of work amenable to remote.
Very weird to market this as subscribing to "Elon process for software"
I remember when defcon ctf would play Geohot's PlayStation rap video every year on the wall.
I hate it when ‘inspirational’ quotes are attributed to the person with the largest audience and not the people who came up with it, like in this case, the engineers at Lockheed’s Skunk Works.
You would be amazed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ
> To fund the operation, we have a computer sales division that makes about $2M revenue a year.
What's the margin on that? Do 5 software engineers really subsist on the spread from moving $2M/yr in hardware?
George raised $5.1M in 2023 for Tinygrad
Is it really "Complex"? Or did we just make it "Complicated"? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY
Programming a GPU in 2025 is complex, that might be because it has been made complicated, but regardless, it is not complexity that this project can control.
The fact that it competes with PyTorch in so few lines speaks to the incredibly low incidental complexity imposed by Tinygrad.
What would tinygrad replace if they continue to proceed like this?
I think it has great potential for deployments on edge systems.
Potentially PyTorch and Tensorflow.
> tinygrad is following the Elon process for software. Make the requirements less dumb. The best part is no part.
That’s not Elon. See Russian TRIZ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ
So this is all python? I bet Chris Lattner probably approached them.
Lattner is a smart guy, but I think Mojo might be the wrong direction.
Time will tell.
History has not so far been kind to projects which attempt to supplant cPython, whether they are other Python variants such as PyPy, or other languages such as julia.
Python has a lot of detractors, but (despite some huge missteps with the 2-3 transition) the core team keeps churning out stuff that people want to use.
Mojo is being positioned "as a member of the Python family" but, like Pyrex/Cython, it has special syntax, and even worse, the calling convention is both different than Python, and depends on the type of variable being passed. And the introspection is completely missing.
Fell bad for geohotz. Such a lovely guy, i hope he strikes it right soon
Seems like he's doing fine, why do you feel bad for him?
[flagged]
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
the value is the directness, not implied origination
not everyone cares about playing voldemort
What is so aggrandizingly 'direct' about calling the system you are attempting to improve 'dumb'?
There are lots of bubbles where Elon is still king. Those bubbles are often void of deodorant.
Based on the response it appears HN is one such bubble.
Elon spent billions to buy a platform and promote his tweets. He spent billions more to create a tweaked AI model that praised him like a mad king.
He only has to spend a couple thousand a month to influence comment ranking on HN.