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Ask HN: Can you crowdfund the compute for GPT?

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11–20 of 157 posts

Re: Ask HN: Can you crowdfund the compute for GPT?

#12
It's not that easy. Access to enough compute is one thing. However, you also need a proper dataset (beyond Common Crawl and Wikipedia), excellent research expertise and engineering capabilities. So even if you throw money or free credits for cloud compute out there it will not be enough. We've seen this happen with EleutherAI who were not capable of reaching their initial target of "replicating" GPT-3 and could only deliver the GPT-NeoX 20B model despite all the free compute etc.

Re: Ask HN: Can you crowdfund the compute for GPT?

#15
post #12

It's not that easy. Access to enough compute is one thing. However, you also need a proper dataset (beyond Common Crawl and Wikipedia), excellent research expertise and engineering capabilities. So even if you throw money or free credits for cloud compute out there it will not be enough. We've seen this happen with EleutherAI who were not capable of reaching their initial target of "replicating" GPT-3 and could only…

Agreed, I was thinking the same thing. Raw compute is probably the cheapest/easiest part of this problem.

Re: Ask HN: Can you crowdfund the compute for GPT?

#18
post #8

What type of hardware is needed as the bare bones for this?

Depends on which version you're running. According to https://github.com/amirgholami/ai_and_memory_wall And a guy with a youtube channel called "Asianometry" who did a video on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tmGKTNW8DQ the full GPT-3 model needs thousands of high-end GPUs (meaning: not your home 1080 GPU)

Re: Ask HN: Can you crowdfund the compute for GPT?

#19
post #9

It's no different from any other type of server I think? Crowdfunding compute comes with a lot of security and privacy concerns and often if you're building a product putting that part of it in the hands of someone reliable is preferable. It depends on what part of what you're building is your core intellectual property and such. I'll ask back: what products would you build on top of a crowdfunded-compute GPT like mo…

Personally? One I'm interested in is a personal assistant that has access to 100+ APIs that I can command solely with text e.g ability to schedule future tasks, ability to get answers to questions around real world events and data available through APIs, ability to combine a lot of these things. What Alexa could/should have been.

Separately, examination of religious and historic tests in alternate languages providing superior transliteration and translation into english than what humans could achieve.

Re: Ask HN: Can you crowdfund the compute for GPT?

#20
post #10

Side hot take: 1. “AI” requires compute time for training (GPT, etc.) 2. If you use any “AI” service in the future, you could have to share idle computing power to improve that “AI.” 3. This may be tokenized via crypto. More contributions = more “AI” usage available for you. Could the use of tokens or cryptocurrency incentivize participants to contribute their idle computing power to facilitate the process beyond tho…

Would this work? I can't see meaningful work being down on the dataset piecewise.

Don't you need the load the entire parameter set to backpropagate and potentially at quite high precision. Then probably load less than 8gb as typical max vram. And then finally send that all back.

I think you really need dedicated data centres if only to move the parameters around and load the entire thing at once.

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