Modern CTO #302 Jonathan Ross - CEO & Founder at Groq
Mar 19, 2021
Jonathan Ross, CEO and Founder at Groq, discusses how Groq's processors aim to make compute functionally free for everyone, the importance of culture items in a scaling organization, and why hiring engineers with high empathy leads to innovation. They also explore the manufacturing process of chips, the value proposition of compute power, the limits of physical chips and reversible computing.
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AlphaGo on TPU
- Jonathan Ross's team at Google helped AlphaGo win against Lee Sedol by porting the software to TPU.
- The TPU version outperformed the GPU version, proving TPU's power.
Software-First Design
- Jonathan realized the difficulty of programming TPUs even for their designers.
- This led to Groq's focus on software-first design, prioritizing compiler development before chip architecture.
Learning Chip Design
- Jonathan learned chip design through an online flash video game and a job interview.
- He treated chip design like software, despite lacking formal hardware training.