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Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height

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Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height

#141

Post by mxcrossb »

fxtentacle wrote: post #84
derefr wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, to put that another way: if you knew what algorithm the AI would be using to discriminate the signal from the noise in your data, why would you need the AI? Just write that algorithm.

Exactly :) In most cases, unsupervised learning is nothing more than having the AI try to approximate the solution of your highly non-linear loss function. So if there's any way of solving that loss function directly, it will perform like a well-trained AI.

> In most cases

In what cases is this not true?

Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height

#142

Post by steev »

roel_v wrote: post #114
m0zg wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTW, the only reason why consumer vacuum cleaners are so loud is because consumers associate loudness with suction power. "Backpack" style commercial vacuum cleaners have more suction, and are barely audible in comparison.

I don't know about backpack style vacuums (the few I've seen seem plenty loud), but the idea that manufacturers deliberately create loud vacuums to make them seem more powerful is ridiculous. There is an entire market segment of vacuums that are marketed as 'quiet', so there is plenty of demand for quiet vacuums. There is simply a trade off between suction / loudness / price, and various models make different trade o…

This doesn't seem any more ridiculous than companies setting a higher price and then always having the item on sale. I think JCPenny famously tried simply lowering their prices and sales went down. I guarantee if you ask the average person "would you rather companies cut the BS and just lower their prices rather than have items on sale in perpetuity" they would of course say lower the prices. But as the anecdote would demonstrate, that isn't how things actually play out.

The point is, when it comes to consumer behavior, I don't think anyone has a clue what to expect. It would not surprise one bit if vacuum companies make louder vacuums because the consumer thinks it works better.

Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height

#143

Post by echelon »

bob1029 wrote: post #29
m0zg wrote: post #8

"Huge compute bills" usually come from training, or to be more precise, hyperparameter search that's required before you find a model that works well. You could also fail to find such a model, but that's another discussion. So yeah, you could spend one or two FTE salaries' (or one deep learning PhD's) worth of cash on finding such models for your startup if you insist on helping Jeff Bezos to wipe his tears with cris…

I find it fun how the cost of the cloud is forcing people to consider what absolutely must run in the cloud (presumably for stability and compliance reasons) and what can be brought back on-prem. We don't train ML models, but we are in a similar boat regarding cloud compute costs. Building our solutions for our clients is a compute-heavy task which is getting expensive in the cloud. We are considering options such as…

> I find it fun how the cost of the cloud is forcing people to consider what absolutely must run in the cloud

Honestly why ever go to the cloud? It seems like a Larry Ellison boondoggle with the absurdly high costs and lock-in. (Ever look at moving your data?)

Running your own metal is cheaper if you actually fund it.

Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height

#144

Post by blt »

bob1029 wrote: post #104
blt wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I worked from home and my employer asked me to install a server in my home, I would tell them to go fuck themselves. It's noisy, it takes up space, and presumably I'm on call to fix it if it breaks. You should pay them an extra 24x(PSU wattage)x(peak $/Wh in area) per day for the electricity too. I'm alarmed that someone in your company felt this idea was appropriate enough to propose.

We would certainly compensate employees. I didn't feel it appropriate to disclose every last detail regarding the arrangement in a thread which is only tangentially-related to the OP. This was my idea. I am a developer in my company. We are a flat structure. We have a lot of respect for each other. I am on a standup with the CEO every day. We all believe in our product and would happily participate in whatever activi…

Do you have an ownership stake in the company?

Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height

#146

Post by eyegor »

liuliu wrote: post #132
m0zg wrote: post #8

"Huge compute bills" usually come from training, or to be more precise, hyperparameter search that's required before you find a model that works well. You could also fail to find such a model, but that's another discussion. So yeah, you could spend one or two FTE salaries' (or one deep learning PhD's) worth of cash on finding such models for your startup if you insist on helping Jeff Bezos to wipe his tears with cris…

I've been playing with custom-built 2080 Ti workstation for a while: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF3JYEIsjH8 Several issues: 1. electricity bill is still an issue, I've been paying anywhere between $500 to $1000 per month for this workstation (always have something to train). 2. something with a decent memory size (Titan RTX and RTX 8000) cost way too much; 3. once you reached a point of 4-2080Ti-is-not-fast-enou…

10gbe will depend on the workload. In general, I'd assume it's fine because it takes a parallel raid setup to saturate. Upgrading to 100gbe is pretty unreasonable cost wise unless you buy network gear from a back alley van dealer.

Although once you reach 4 2080ti, you ought to consider switching to a titanium grade psu and rewiring if you're in a 100-120v country. If you're feeling cheap, just steal the phases from two different circuits. Last I looked, most psu operate around 5% lower efficiency on 115 vs 230.

Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height

#147

Post by dboreham »

joshuaellinger wrote: post #76

I just spent $50K on coloc hardware. I'm taking a $10K/mo Azure spend down to a $1K/mo hosting cost. But the real kicker is that I get x5 the cores, x20 RAM, x10 storage, and a couple of GPUs. I'm running last-generation Infiniband (56gb/sec) and modern U.2 SSDs (say 500MB/sec per device). I figure it is going to take me about $10K in labor to move and then $1K/mo to maintain and pay for services that are bundled in…

We never went cloud, except for ancillary things like build machines, nagios etc that run on tiny VMs. Whenever I looked at the economics I could buy a server of the class we needed for roughly 2x the monthly rent for the equivalent from Amazon.

Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height

#148

Post by walshemj »

burnte wrote: post #137
joshuaellinger wrote: post #76

I just spent $50K on coloc hardware. I'm taking a $10K/mo Azure spend down to a $1K/mo hosting cost. But the real kicker is that I get x5 the cores, x20 RAM, x10 storage, and a couple of GPUs. I'm running last-generation Infiniband (56gb/sec) and modern U.2 SSDs (say 500MB/sec per device). I figure it is going to take me about $10K in labor to move and then $1K/mo to maintain and pay for services that are bundled in…

I did similar at my current and last job. Rather than spend $24k/month, I spent $50k, bought a shitton of hardware, built a virtualization cluster at Corp, and upgraded our connections. Accounting thought i was a wizard.

Especially as they can amortize that cost in the annual accounts - there might even be RnD tax credits they can use

Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height

#149

Post by perl4ever »

derefr wrote: post #127
nl wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the same thing at all. You can't build hand-build a feature detector as accurate as (say) a ResNet50 by hand. Before 2014 people tried to do this with feature detectors like SIFT and HOG. These were patented and made the inventors significant money. If it was still possible to do it then someone would be and making profit from it. Hyperparameter search is just optimising the training parameters (things lik…

> You can't build hand-build a feature detector as accurate as (say) a ResNet50 by hand. Yes, you can . If , that is, you can actually understand what the produced model is doing. And, of course, no human can do that, because no human understands the algorithm being employed by the produced model, because it's a really freaking complex algorithm whose optimal formulation really is just a graph of matrix transformatio…

"There would be no gain from using ML in RDBMS query planning. It's regular data; the AI's trained model would just be a recapitulation of the query-planning algorithm we already have."

Most of what you wrote seems fine, until I got to this. A query optimizer seems like something that tends to be very opaque, very complex, and in my experience blows up without a good explanation frequently in typical situations. It's also based on a lack of complete data about the problem domain, to the point where an optimal algorithm seems hopeless. I'm not saying an AI approach automatically can be better, but at least you (I) can envision it being better, perhaps less brittle and taking into account dimensions and possibilities a human doesn't. And the non-AI solutions aren't trustworthy in terms of bounded quality so you have not got a lot to lose.

Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height

#150

Post by m0zg »

roel_v wrote: post #114
m0zg wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTW, the only reason why consumer vacuum cleaners are so loud is because consumers associate loudness with suction power. "Backpack" style commercial vacuum cleaners have more suction, and are barely audible in comparison.

I don't know about backpack style vacuums (the few I've seen seem plenty loud), but the idea that manufacturers deliberately create loud vacuums to make them seem more powerful is ridiculous. There is an entire market segment of vacuums that are marketed as 'quiet', so there is plenty of demand for quiet vacuums. There is simply a trade off between suction / loudness / price, and various models make different trade o…

Is BMW piping in fake "engine noise" through the speakers also "ridiculous" in your opinion?
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