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Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

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Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#11

Post by eridius »

dpwm wrote: post #7

There's a lot of comments on that reddit thread about how awesome this would be as a service. But there's a big problem of trust with this for ML. How do I know you actually ran what I paid you for and not just generated random data that looks right in the shape I wanted it? You could farm it out to two people and if the results disagree, then payment is decided by a third. But then you've just doubled the (paid) wor…

Being able to generate random data in the right shape for arbitrary ML workloads would be a pretty impressive technical achievement.

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#13

Post by throwaway2048 »

gormanc wrote: post #10
dpwm wrote: post #7

There's a lot of comments on that reddit thread about how awesome this would be as a service. But there's a big problem of trust with this for ML. How do I know you actually ran what I paid you for and not just generated random data that looks right in the shape I wanted it? You could farm it out to two people and if the results disagree, then payment is decided by a third. But then you've just doubled the (paid) wor…

According to the website ( https://vectordash.com/hosting/ ) they use a highly isolated Ubuntu image, so the person hosting the service shouldn't have access to the VM with your model or data on it. It would be nice if there was some third party audit of the software though, the models, the code, and even the training data can be pretty sensitive for researchers.

there is no way to "highly isolate" a VM from a host.

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#15

Post by lostmsu »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #13
gormanc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the website ( https://vectordash.com/hosting/ ) they use a highly isolated Ubuntu image, so the person hosting the service shouldn't have access to the VM with your model or data on it. It would be nice if there was some third party audit of the software though, the models, the code, and even the training data can be pretty sensitive for researchers.

there is no way to "highly isolate" a VM from a host.

But there is (though I think they don't use it): TPM based host attestation.

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#16

Post by nandhp »

dpwm wrote: post #7

There's a lot of comments on that reddit thread about how awesome this would be as a service. But there's a big problem of trust with this for ML. How do I know you actually ran what I paid you for and not just generated random data that looks right in the shape I wanted it? You could farm it out to two people and if the results disagree, then payment is decided by a third. But then you've just doubled the (paid) wor…

This sort of effort has existed for a long time, e.g. SETI@home and the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (although they don't tend to pay people). They've faced many of these same problems, and presumably devised minimum overhead solutions.

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#17

Post by q3k »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #13
gormanc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the website ( https://vectordash.com/hosting/ ) they use a highly isolated Ubuntu image, so the person hosting the service shouldn't have access to the VM with your model or data on it. It would be nice if there was some third party audit of the software though, the models, the code, and even the training data can be pretty sensitive for researchers.

there is no way to "highly isolate" a VM from a host.

Theoretically possible via SGX.

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#19

Post by Samin100 »

dpwm wrote: post #7

There's a lot of comments on that reddit thread about how awesome this would be as a service. But there's a big problem of trust with this for ML. How do I know you actually ran what I paid you for and not just generated random data that looks right in the shape I wanted it? You could farm it out to two people and if the results disagree, then payment is decided by a third. But then you've just doubled the (paid) wor…

It's pretty much letting people with GPUs become a sort of 'mini-cloud provider'. There's no job queue or fancy distributing computing setup. We just let you SSH into a container on someone's computer, and pay for the time used.

I was doing a lot of fun deep learning projects on the side & would often Venmo my friend who was mining Ethereum to use his GPU to train my models. He made more and I paid less than AWS spot instances or Paperspace.

This is just a fun side project hoping to let people who want to train their deep learning models do it cheaply (on other people's computers!)

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#20

Post by mmozeiko »

q3k wrote: post #17
throwaway2048 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there is no way to "highly isolate" a VM from a host.

Theoretically possible via SGX.

Which can be defeated with SgxSpectre: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.09085
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