I have told this story here before, but:
I gave a talk at Oracle around 2018 or so, to a largely empty room. The floor I was visiting was completely empty. They had just had a quarterly project review with Ellison and he'd said that there was no market for the thing they were building and fired them all.
The thing they were building? A high-performance accelerator for multiplying matrixes together.
Larry Ellison, just as Google / Deep Mind were announcing their TPU publicly, and as the bubble was starting to kick off in earnest, decided that there was no commercial market for high-performance matrix multiplication.
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
npub13g…dk50d
2026-03-31 15:31:36 UTC
in reply to nevent1q…v5h2
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