by behnamoh 18 hours ago
It's insane that the source code of ANE is not available even to the MLX team, possibly one of the reasons Awni (MLX project head) left Apple.
This doesn’t seem that weird to me?
* They haven’t said the source isn’t available to them, just that the closed nature of the ANE means they can’t use it in OSS.
* They’ve repeated constantly that it can’t do backprop and isn’t useful for most MLX use cases.
And really, ANE isn’t even that interesting for MLX really; it’s a limited resource power efficient inference engine for smallish edge models. If you want to use it you can use the Apple APIs, which while limited are generally “shaped” like what you’d want to do anyway. Almost every “biggish” CPU has one of these now and Apple don’t want to give away the specifics of theirs (even though it’s been pretty thoroughly RE’d by real REs and re-summarized by Claude, like this article).
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Yes I haven't worked at a hardware company, nothing to be ashamed of!
I'm not op but I don't think op meant to shame, I understand the construction "tell me you're... without telling me" as a way to highlight that something is unexpected to people who haven't done something, that is that something is particularly unintuitive without some special experience.
he did a reddit (cringe) and now must be punished for it (the text becomes an absolutely fucking unreadable shade of light grey)
> It's insane that the source code of ANE is not available even to the MLX team
no it's not insane - it's completely mundane policy. that's my point - that you're calling something out as insane with exactly zero experience (which is the actually insane thing...).
on that line of argument, nobody would have ever called out the emperor for not wearing any clothes, civilians would not go to peace protests, and nobody would ever improve things by looking at something from another angle.
This is a completely asinine take - you're not observing the emperor with no clothes here - you're completely outside the kingdom hypothesizing that the emperor has no clothes. To wit: you don't actually know the the ANE "source" isn't available to MLX. Hint: it probably is but there's just red tape involved.
actually, it really is not neccesarily a 'hardware company' thing. ive been in 'hardware companies' where the rtl was just as available for viewing as the rest of the firmware/software.
in big hardware companies, things start getting siloed, but that probably has more to do with big companies (seemingly invariably) operating as a union of fiefdoms (dunbar-number-ification?)