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Tinybox – A powerful computer for deep learning (https://tinygrad.org)

575 points by albelfio 1 day ago | 334 comments | View on ycombinator

bastawhiz 1 day ago |

There's no way the red v2 is doing anything with a 120b parameter model. I just finished building a dual a100 ai homelab (80gb vram combined with nvlink). Similar stats otherwise. 120b only fits with very heavy quantization, enough to make the model schizophrenic in my experience. And there's no room for kv, so you'll OOM around 4k of context.

I'm running a 70b model now that's okay, but it's still fairly tight. And I've got 16gb more vram then the red v2.

I'm also confused why this is 12U. My whole rig is 4u.

The green v2 has better GPUs. But for $65k, I'd expect a much better CPU and 256gb of RAM. It's not like a threadripper 7000 is going to break the bank.

I'm glad this exists but it's... honestly pretty perplexing

ivraatiems 1 day ago |

There's some irony in the fact that this website reads as extremely NOT AI-generated, very human in the way it's designed and the tone of its writing.

Still, this is a great idea, and one I hope takes off. I think there's a good argument that the future of AI is in locally-trained models for everyone, rather than relying on a big company's own model.

One thought: The ability to conveniently get this onto a 240v circuit would be nice. Having to find two different 120v circuits to plug this into will be a pain for many folks.

vessenes 1 day ago |

The exabox is interesting. I wonder who the customer is; after watching the Vera Rubin launch, I cannot imagine deciding I wanted to compete with NVIDIA for hyperscale business right now. Maybe it’s aiming at a value-conscious buyer? Maybe it’s a sensible buy for a (relatively) cash-strapped ML startup; actually I just checked prices, and it looks like Vera Rubin costs half for a similar amount of GPU RAM. I’m certain that the interconnect will not be as good as NV’s.

I have no idea who would buy this. Maybe if you think Vera Rubin is three years out? But NV ships, man, they are shipping.

paxys 1 day ago |

The problem with all these "AI box" startups is that the product is too expensive for hobbyists, and companies that need to run workloads at scale can always build their own servers and racks and save on the markup (which is substantial). Unless someone can figure out how to get cheaper GPUs & RAM there is really no margin left to squeeze out.

alexfromapex 1 day ago |

$12,000 for the base model is insane. I have an Apple M3 Max with 128GB RAM that can run 120B parameter models using like 80 watts of electricity at about 15-20 tokens/sec. It's not amazing for 120B parameter models but it's also not 12 grand.

roarcher 1 day ago |

> In order to keep prices low and quality high, we don't offer any customization to the box or ordering process. If you aren't capable of ordering through the website, I'm sorry but we won't be able to help.

Has this guy never worked on a B2B product before? Nobody is going to order a $10 million piece of infrastructure through your website's order form. And they are definitely going to want to negotiate something, even if it's just a warranty. And you'll do it because they're waving a $10 million check in your face.

The tone of this website is arrogant to the point of being almost hostile. The guy behind this seems to think that his name carries enough weight to dictate terms like this, among other things like requiring candidates to have already contributed to his product to even be considered for a job. I would be extremely surprised if anyone except him thinks he's that important.

siliconc0w 1 day ago |

Tinybox is cool but I think the market is maybe looking more for a turn-key explicit promise of some level of intelligence @ a certain Tok/s like "Kimi 2.5 at 50Tok/s".

mellosouls 1 day ago |

Where is the 120B documented? This seems to be an editorialized title.

Edit: found a third party referencing the claim but it doesn't belong in the title here I think:

Meet the World’s Smallest ‘Supercomputer’ from Tiiny AI; A Machine Bold Enough to Run 120B AI Models Right in the Palm of Your Hand

https://wccftech.com/meet-the-worlds-smallest-supercomputer-...

hmokiguess 1 day ago |

Is this like the new equivalent of crypto mining? I remember the early days when they would sell hardware for farming crypto, now it’s AI?

adrianwaj 1 day ago |

Perhaps this company should think about acting as a landlord for their hardware. You buy (or lease) but they also offer colocation hosting. They could partner with crypto miners who are transitioning to AI factories to find the space and power to do this. I wonder if the machines require added cooling, though, in what would otherwise be a crypto mining center. CoreWeave made the transition and also do colocation. The switchover is real.

I think Tinygrad should think about recycling. Are they planning ahead in this regard? Is anyone? My thought is if there was a central database of who own what and where, at least when the recycling tech become available, people will know where to source their specific trash (and even pay for it.) Having a database like that in the first place could even fuel the industry.

ekropotin 1 day ago |

IDK, I feel it’s quite overpriced, even with the current component prices.

I almost sure it’s possible to custom build a machine as powerful as their red v2 within 9k budget. And have a lot of fun along the way.

operatingthetan 1 day ago |

The incremental price increases between products is funny.

$12,000, $65,000, $10,000,000.

adi_kurian 1 day ago |

mmoustafa 1 day ago |

I would love to see real-life tokens/sec values advertised for one or various specific open source models.

I'm currently shopping for offline hardware and it is very hard to estimate the performance I will get before dropping $12K, and would love to have a baseline that I can at least always get e.g. 40 tok/s running GPT-OSS-120B using Ollama on Ubuntu out of the box.

mciancia 1 day ago |

Not sure why they stopped using 6 GPUs in thei builds - with 4 GPUs, both 9070 and rtx6000 come in 2 slot designs, so it easy to build it yourself using a bit more expensive, but still fairly regular motherboard.

With 6 GPUs you have to deal with risers, pcie retimers, dual PSUs and custom case for so value proposition there was much better IMO

the_arun about 12 hours ago |

Curious to know who will spend this much money without external funding? Would you spend any VC invested money into this nameless brand? Are there any guardrails or clauses to protect the kind of expenses?

wongarsu 1 day ago |

Sound like solid prebuilt with well balanced components and a pretty case

Not revolutionary in any way, but nice. Unless I'm missing something here?

comrade1234 1 day ago |

Cool that you have a dual power supply model. It says rack mountable or free standing. Does that mean two form factors? $65K is more than we can afford right now but we are definitely eventually in the market for something we can run in our own colo.

It's funny though... we're using deepseek now for features in our service and based on our customer-type we thought that they would be completely against sending their data to a third-party. We thought we'd have to do everything locally. But they seem ok with deepseek which is practically free. And the few customers that still worry about privacy may not justify such a high price point.

ks2048 1 day ago |

"... and likely the best performance/$".

"likely" doesn't inspire much confidence. Surely, they have those numbers, and if it was, they'd publicize the comparisons.

SmartestUnknown 1 day ago |

Regarding 2x faster than pytorch being a condition for tinygrad to come out of alpha:

Can they/someone else give more details as to what workloads pytorch is more than 2x slower than the hardware provides? Most of the papers use standard components and I assume pytorch is already pretty performant at implementing them at 50+% of extractable performance from typical GPUs.

If they mean more esoteric stuff that requires writing custom kernels to get good performance out of the chips, then that's a different issue.

algolint about 17 hours ago |

The most interesting part of Tinybox isn't just the hardware, but the push for a more vertical integration with tinygrad. We've become so accustomed to the CUDA/PyTorch stack that seeing a serious attempt at a different software-hardware synergy is refreshing, even if the hardware specs or price point relative to DIY homelabs raise some eyebrows for power users. It's more about reducing the friction for researchers who want a "just works" environment without the nightmare of driver/toolkit version hell.

mayukh 1 day ago |

What’s the most effective ~$5k setup today? Interested in what people are actually running.

undefined about 24 hours ago |

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triwats about 13 hours ago |

This is cool, I'll add these as desktops to https://flopper.io!

How do you test/generate these numbers?

ilaksh 1 day ago |

I thought the most interesting thing about tinygrad was that theoretically you could render a model all the way into hardware similar to Taalas (tinygrad might be where Taalas got the idea for all I know).

I could swear I filed a GitHub issue asking about the plans for that but I don't see it. Anyway I think he mentioned it when explaining tinygrad at one point and I have wondered why that hasn't got more attention.

As far as boxes, I wish that there were more MI355X available for normal hourly rental. Or any.

alasdair_ 1 day ago |

I just don’t believe that this can run inference on a 120 billion parameter model at actually useful speeds.

Obviously any Turing machine can run any size of model, so the “120B” claim doesn’t mean much - what actually matters is speed and I just don’t believe this can be speedy enough on models that my $5000 5090-based pc is too slow for and lacks enough vram for.

jmspring 1 day ago |

Tinygrad devices are interesting, I wish I have screen captures - but their prices have gone up and some specs like RAM have gone down.

A single box with those specs without having to build/configure (the red and green) - I could see being useful if you had $ and not time to build/configure/etc yourself.

jeremie_strand 1 day ago |

The AMD angle is interesting given the history — tinygrad has had to work around a lot of driver quirks to get ROCm into a usable state. At that price point, you're esentially betting on a software stack that NVIDIA has had years to stabilize. Would be curious to see real-world utilization numbers vs. a comparable NVIDIA setup.

himata4113 1 day ago |

exabox reads as if it was making a joke of something or someone. if it's real then it's really interesting!

saidnooneever about 19 hours ago |

its a bit weird to me ud need to be contributor to their software to work in operations or hardware, but I suppose its ok for tinycompany. in long term its likely better to have domain experts and not bias everything towards the same thing.

the boxes look cool but how good are they really? the cheapest box seems pricey at 12 for a what is essentially a few gaming gpus. i dont see why you couldnt make that like half the price. u could do a PC/server build thats much much faster for way less. size doesnt matter if its more than twice the price i think...

the more expensive box has atleast real processing gpus but afaik also not very popular ones, this one seems maybe more fair priced (there seems a big difference in bang for buck between these???).

the third one suggested looks like a joke.

dont get me wrong, this seems like a really cool idea. But i dont see it taking off as the prices are corporate but the product seems more home use.

maybe in time they will find a better balance, i do respect the fact that the component market now is sour as hell and making good products with stable prices is pretty much i possible.

id love one of these machines someday, maybe when i am less poor, or when they are xD.

(love the styling of everything, this is the most critical i could be from a dumb consumer perspective, which i totally am btw.)

zahirbmirza 1 day ago |

10 mil today... 1k in 10 years. Are OpenAI and Anthropic overvalued?

Buttons840 1 day ago |

Oh, this is geohots product?

He's an interesting guy. Seems to be one who does things the way he thinks is right, regardless of corporate profits.

p0w3n3d 1 day ago |

Quite expensive little bastard. I wonder how much does it make sense to invest in a such device, if you can get $0.40/mtok from hyperbolic for example

heinternets 1 day ago |

exabox -

720x RDNA5 AT0 XL 25,920 GB VRAM 23,040 GB System RAM

~ $10 Million

Who is the target market here?

andai 1 day ago |

Can someone explain the exabox? They say it "functions as a single GPU". Is there anything like that currently existing?

sudo_cowsay 1 day ago |

I always wonder about these expensive products: Does the company make them once its ordered or do they just make them beforehand?

operatingthetan 1 day ago |

Are we at the point where 2x 9070XT's are a viable LLM platform? (I know this has 4, just wondering for myself).

agnishom about 23 hours ago |

Who is the intended customer for this product? I am genuinely curious.

orliesaurus 1 day ago |

I wonder if this is frontpage right now because of the other tiiny (the names are similar) video that went viral ... which turns out wasn't an actual product by the tinygrad linked in this post[1]

[1]https://x.com/ShriKaranHanda/status/2035284883384553953

jgarzik 1 day ago |

Skeptical of their engineering, with replies to questions like this: https://x.com/jgarzik/status/2031312666036146460?s=20

droidjj 1 day ago |

Adding this to my list of ~beautifully~ designed things to buy when I win the lottery.

qubex about 20 hours ago |

I just backed their TINY on Kickstarter.

mememememememo 1 day ago |

Give me token/s for favourite models.

ppap3 1 day ago |

I thought there was a typo in the price

raincole 1 day ago |

How does this thing cool down?

vlovich123 1 day ago |

Surprising to see this with AMD GPUs considering how George famously threw up his hands as AMD not being worth working with.

DeathArrow about 14 hours ago |

I wonder how much has he sold.

DeathArrow about 15 hours ago |

Why do I get the impression that I get more bang for the buck by going through OpenRouter? Of course, not anyone can do that and there are security and other concerns.

throwatdem12311 1 day ago |

Finally, a computer that should be able to run Monster Hunter Wilds with decent performance.

But let’s be real, 12k is kinda pushing it - what kind of people are gonna spend $65k or even $10M (lmao WTAF) on a boutique thing like this. I dont think these kinds of things go in datacenters (happy to be corrected) and they are way too expensive (and probably way too HOT) to just go in a home or even an office “closet”.

rpastuszak 1 day ago |

Who is this for?

gymbeaux about 21 hours ago |

$12,000 gets you 1Gb/s networking and vanilla Ubuntu 24.04. Napkin math on the hardware it looks like margins are around 50% which feels like a school fundraiser where everyone pays what is obviously way more than normal retail price for X because "it's for the children."

I'm not sure what tinygrad is but I assume the markup is because the customer is making a conscious choice to support the tinygrad project. But what's unusual is there is apparently no reason whatsoever to buy this hardware, even if you plan on using tinygrad exclusively for your project. At least with System76 hardware I get (in theory) first class support for Pop!_OS.

kylehotchkiss 1 day ago |

Meanwhile M-series processors and Qwen are racing to do the same thing for a much more approachable price.

arunakt 1 day ago |

Great idea, can you publish the power consumption units for this device

renewiltord 1 day ago |

I have 8x RTX 6000 Pro. Better to run the 300 W version of the cards. And it costs close to their 4x version. I get why they make it so big. So you can cool it at home. I prefer to just put in datacenter. Much cheaper power.

aabaker99 1 day ago |

> Can I pay with something besides wire transfer? In order to keep prices low and quality high, we don't offer any customization to the box or ordering process. Wire transfer is the only accepted form of payment.

Sorry, what? Is this just a scam?

jauntywundrkind 1 day ago |

My interest in anything associated with geohot took a colossal nose dive today after seeing this post against democracy, quoting frelling M*ncius M*ldbug: Democracy is a Liability. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47469543 https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2026/03/21/demo...

Theres a lot there that makes sense & I think needs to be considered. But a lot just seems to be out of the blue, included without connection, in my view. Feels like maybe are in-grouo messages, that I don't understand. How this is headered as against democracy is unclear to me, and revolting. I both think we must grapple with the world as it is, and this post is in that area, strongly, but to let fear be the dominant ruling emotion is one of the main definitions of conservativism, and it's use here to scare us sounds bad.

insane_dreamer about 23 hours ago |

Is this real? Reads like a joke. They sell a $12K machine, a $60K machine, and a $10M machine???

flykespice 1 day ago |

"tiny" and it's 20k lbs and cost about 10k...

Since when did our perception of tiny blow out of size in tech? Is it the influence of "hello world" eletron apps consuming 100mb of mem while idle setting the new standard? Anyway being an AI bro seems like an expensive hobby...

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fhn 1 day ago |

"but if you haven't contributed to tinygrad your application won't be considered" this company expects people to work for free?