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varunkmohan

366 karma · joined September 1, 2015

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varunkmohan··on Why Did Microsoft Build VSCode? Turns Out, GitHub Copilot
They did not, Microsoft made the bet that there would be some application in the future that would require distribution to all developers. Turns out that application was Github Copilot.
varunkmohan··on Replit's new Code LLM: Open Source, 77% smaller than Codex, trained in 1 week
Hi from the Codeium team. It's awesome to hear you are allowing other code LLMs to be used on the Replit platform (we're big fans)! We'd love to enable our free chrome extension on Replit.
varunkmohan··on Ask HN: Any good GitHub Copilot alternatives?
We explicitly state in our privacy policy that we don't sell user data to third parties.

The language server is the common binary cross ides that actually processes local / repo context and communicates with the cloud service to generate completions. For now, that is closed source, similar to other tools like Tabnine and Copilot, but we may change that in the future.

varunkmohan··on Ask HN: Any good GitHub Copilot alternatives?
Hi, Varun from the Codeium team here. This is fairly common thing to do to not support these sorts of domains to prevent abuse. Also, Copilot downloads a language server binary as well for their vim extension.

Happy to discuss how we could improve.

varunkmohan··on Cerebras-GPT vs. LLaMA AI Model Performance Comparison
Sad, this whole thing where companies train chinchilla optimal models has to stop - I'm always happy to get open source models but it would be great if it was useful rather than a benchmark.
varunkmohan··on Employees are feeding sensitive data to ChatGPT, raising security fears
Exactly why our product Codeium (Copilot alternative) supports self-hosting.
varunkmohan··on Stanford’s Alpaca shows that OpenAI may have a problem
OpenAI has done the reasonable thing of not exposing the probability distribution per generated token so it's very hard to use that to completely map to their models. Ultimately, you still do need a very large base model to compete.
varunkmohan··on CoLT5: Faster Long-Range Transformers With Conditional Computation
This looks very cool and is a massive improvement. If only OpenAI would also publish what they are doing to make 32K work.
varunkmohan··on Run 100B+ language models at home, BitTorrent‑style
Curious if anyone has actually used this. It's quite slow for me and feels more like a cute idea rather than a useful product.
varunkmohan··on Show HN: Codeium: Free Copilot Alternative for Vim / Neovim
Thanks for the feedback. Currently there is not, but we will look into setting up custom keybindings or some other approach.
varunkmohan··on Show HN: Codeium: Free Copilot Alternative for Vim / Neovim
It isn't zero, that's for sure! Before Codeium, we as a team were building scalable ML infrastructure for some of the world's largest ML workloads, so we have a lot of experience in building infra (especially ML serving infra) that optimizes computation on GPUs/mixed compute resources to drastically reduce serving costs. We will probably talk more about these infra side optimizations in future blog posts!
varunkmohan··on Show HN: Codeium: Free Copilot Alternative for Vim / Neovim
I don't really want to argue but we have been pretty open about the fact that we want to keep this product free for users going forward as well. We have been pretty clear about our plan to monetize additional features but the focus now is to democratize this technology.
varunkmohan··on Show HN: Codeium: Free Copilot Alternative for Vim / Neovim
We are a free product.
varunkmohan··on Show HN: Codeium: Free Copilot Alternative for Vim / Neovim
We are actively iterating on our data cleaning to deanonymize any user information. Of course some cases are tricky to find, but we recognize these issues are serious and will continue to work here. All of our training data is public, so we know that we won't ever produce private user info.
varunkmohan··on Show HN: Codeium: Free Copilot Alternative for Vim / Neovim
Elixir is not a language we are currently confident in, but in the very near future (O(weeks)), we believe we will have a model that is better than Copilot for Elixir and other niche languages.
varunkmohan··on Show HN: Codeium: Free Copilot Alternative for Vim / Neovim
We don't rely on any 3rd party APIs in order to keep serving costs down (which is necessary to keep this as a free service). We only use permissively licensed public code to train.
varunkmohan··on Show HN: Codeium: Free Copilot Alternative for Vim / Neovim
No the model actually runs remotely. We would love to have some way to run a lightweight model on the user's machines but it's just not feasible given model size and amount of computation required.
varunkmohan··on Show HN: Codeium: Free Copilot Alternative for Vim / Neovim
Sorry to hear that. Point noted, we will take a look - most of our testing has been on chrome / safari.
varunkmohan··on Show HN: Codeium: Free Copilot Alternative for Vim / Neovim
This is one of the next IDEs we will be supporting! We're keeping folks on our discord (https://discord.com/invite/3XFf78nAx5) updated on this.
varunkmohan··on Show HN: Codeium: Free Copilot Alternative for Vim / Neovim
Yes, good point. Interestingly, our VSCode extension also works on VSCodium since we uploaded it to the OpenVSX registry!
varunkmohan··on Which GPU(s) to get for deep learning
Would be curious to see your benchmarks. Btw, Nvidia will be providing support for fp8 in a future release of CUDA - https://github.com/NVIDIA/TransformerEngine/issues/15

I think TMA may not matter as much for consumer cards given the disproportionate amount of fp32 / int32 compute that they have.

Would be interesting to see how close to theoretical folks are able to get once CUDA support comes through.

varunkmohan··on Which GPU(s) to get for deep learning
I'm not sure any of this is accurate. 8 bit inference on a 4090 can do 660 Tflops and on an H100 can do 2 Pflops. Not to mention, there is no native support for FP8 (which are significantly better for deep learning) on existing CPUs.

The memory on a 4090 can serve extremely large models. Currently, int4 is started to become proven out. With 24GB of memory, you can serve 40 billion parameter models. That coupled with the fact that GPU memory bandwidth is significantly higher than CPU memory bandwidth means that CPUs should rarely ever be cheaper / lower latency than GPUs.

varunkmohan··on Ask HN: How much will a ChatGPT monthly subscription be?
Find it hard to believe developers would pay $100/month unless the product embeds deeply into their workflow. I do think it's an interesting idea to place some limitations and still have a free tier.
varunkmohan··on Ask HN: How much will a ChatGPT monthly subscription be?
I think it's likely the other way around, a product like Copilot is actually much cheaper than if you were to build off of OpenAI's API. ChatGPT, the product, will be much cheaper than if you actually ran the API yourself.

Some context is that I work for a company that builds a product called Codeium, that's a free Copilot alternative. If we were to use OpenAI's API, we computed our costs would be high 100s of dollars a year per user (we've opted for something more custom / in house).

varunkmohan··on Show HN: Codeium: Free Copilot alternative that works in Jupyter notebooks
The model runs on a remote GPU as most users don't have powerful enough GPUs to run run the model with reasonable latency.
varunkmohan··on Production Twitter on one machine? 100Gbps NICs and NVMe are fast
Posted this on a comment above but systems like Whatsapp likely sent an insane amount of data as well but used only 16 servers over 1.5 billion users at time of acquisition. Modern NICs can handle millions of requests a second - I still feel there is a lot of excess here.
varunkmohan··on Production Twitter on one machine? 100Gbps NICs and NVMe are fast
Genuinely asking, why do you think Twitter needs 24 million vcpus to run?

This is not apples to apples but Whatsapp is a product that entirely ran on 16 servers at the time of acquisition (1.5 billion users). It really begs the question why Twitter uses so much compute if there are companies that have operated significantly more efficiently. Twitter was unprofitable during acquisition and spent around half their revenue on compute, maybe some of these features were not really necessary (but were just burning money)?

varunkmohan··on Production Twitter on one machine? 100Gbps NICs and NVMe are fast
Good analysis. Obviously, this doesn't handle cases like redundancy and doesn't handle some of other critical workloads the company has. However, it does show how much real compute bloat these companies actually have - https://twitter.com/petrillic/status/1593686223717269504 where they use 24 million vcpus and spend 300 million a month on cloud.
varunkmohan··on ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon
This feels like what a company that hasn't accepted the future would say. Yes, ChatGPT doesn't do exactly what Google does. Can it be augmented by well understood search retrieval engines to generate a much better response? I think for a lot of cases that seems to be undoubtedly true.
varunkmohan··on Show HN: ClickHouse-local – a small tool for serverless data analytics
Any plans to be able to directly run this in the browser similar to DuckDB. Nice to see more options in the space.
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