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Ask HN: Can you crowdfund the compute for GPT?

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31–40 of 157 posts

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

#32
Star Citizen raised half a billion dollars for a game that is never going to be released and all they did was promise a game in space with spaceships, sooo ...

Yeah, I think we could crowdfund a billion dollars for this, but we'd need some really competent people making sure it gets used optimally.

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

#33
post #25

I've often wondered why a service doesn't exist that allows you to rent out your graphics card for the large data processing needed for training models. Like mining bitcoin except you are doing something actually useful and getting paid actual money for it. Example: - Company Alpha needs $40,000,000 worth of cloud computing for their training model - Company Beta provides them said cloud computing for $30,000,000 fro…

https://vast.ai/

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

#34
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…

Or we could just...pay for stuff. My dear mother isn't going to spin up a GPU so she can talk to her ai assistant. I don't want to be told that I can't do stuff on my phone because I need to purchase a second stack of GPUs for my home because my kids talked to Elmo too much or whatever. We can make data centers that will gladly take money in exchange for their services, and I'm happy to provide money for them to supply those services.

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

#35
post #25

I've often wondered why a service doesn't exist that allows you to rent out your graphics card for the large data processing needed for training models. Like mining bitcoin except you are doing something actually useful and getting paid actual money for it. Example: - Company Alpha needs $40,000,000 worth of cloud computing for their training model - Company Beta provides them said cloud computing for $30,000,000 fro…

Yeah someone posted something like that on HN maybe a year ago.

It's not especially useful though because most companies (who are actually going to pay for this service) aren't going to want to send their training data to random people, and ML training needs high performance links between the cards. Plus you'd have to deal with the fact that you're running on 100 different GPU models.

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

#36
post #25

I've often wondered why a service doesn't exist that allows you to rent out your graphics card for the large data processing needed for training models. Like mining bitcoin except you are doing something actually useful and getting paid actual money for it. Example: - Company Alpha needs $40,000,000 worth of cloud computing for their training model - Company Beta provides them said cloud computing for $30,000,000 fro…

> Like mining bitcoin except you are doing something actually useful and getting paid actual money for it

But then how would crypto-scammers run ponzi after ponzi after ponzi if they did that?

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

#37
post #25

I've often wondered why a service doesn't exist that allows you to rent out your graphics card for the large data processing needed for training models. Like mining bitcoin except you are doing something actually useful and getting paid actual money for it. Example: - Company Alpha needs $40,000,000 worth of cloud computing for their training model - Company Beta provides them said cloud computing for $30,000,000 fro…

ML typically needs decently high bandwidth and low latency links between computers too. Sometimes the algorithm or the data is commercially sensitive. Those are the two main reasons a 'rent out my GPU while I sleep' scheme wouldn't work. Neither are insurmountable though.

[deleted]

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

#38
post #25

I've often wondered why a service doesn't exist that allows you to rent out your graphics card for the large data processing needed for training models. Like mining bitcoin except you are doing something actually useful and getting paid actual money for it. Example: - Company Alpha needs $40,000,000 worth of cloud computing for their training model - Company Beta provides them said cloud computing for $30,000,000 fro…

There is this https://vast.ai/hosting

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

#39
post #25

I've often wondered why a service doesn't exist that allows you to rent out your graphics card for the large data processing needed for training models. Like mining bitcoin except you are doing something actually useful and getting paid actual money for it. Example: - Company Alpha needs $40,000,000 worth of cloud computing for their training model - Company Beta provides them said cloud computing for $30,000,000 fro…

Surprised no one has commented this but the latency requires the model to be trained in tiny fragments on each device which is currently a field of research that is being explored. As it stands now basically all of a model needs to be loaded into memory.

There’s a whole field here and people exploring this problem, colloquially solving this would enable Federated Learning and whoever figures this out will far eclipse OpenAI (if it’s ever solved).

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

#40

Star Citizen raised half a billion dollars for a game that is never going to be released and all they did was promise a game in space with spaceships, sooo ... Yeah, I think we could crowdfund a billion dollars for this, but we'd need some really competent people making sure it gets used optimally.

I think the second part of what you said is key. Seeing this thread hit top of HN I can see there's a desire or need for something like this, but how you'd even go implementing it, I have no idea. I have mildly speculative ideas but nothing that would result in a successful outcome. So it's like OK, lets say you crowdsource even $20m, now what. What's the structure of this thing that has $20m, how do you use it, what do you build, how do you give access to other people? My gut says, co-op style entity, no shares, its membership based, people put in the money for that and infra costs. You don't try do anything fancy, buy compute for cheap, Hetzner, bare metal elsewhere, whatever, find the best open source project currently for GPT and start to run it, provide an API to it and then start to gauge feedback, do everything in the open, hold weekly meetings, be totally transparent about the costs. Ultimately sustainability is still hard because people are crowdfunding you, so is that forever? Is there a self sustainable model there? So many questions.
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