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Ask HN: Can you crowdfund the compute for GPT?

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41–50 of 157 posts

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

#41
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s not clear to me why your first example needs AI. If you have a defined text query setup (maybe with prefixes depending on what you want) the rest is basic case-based API selection, no?

Initially yes, so simple commands to APIs works, I've done this. What's harder and actually requires programming is when you want to combine the use of multiple APIs into some sort of workflow. You could start to write some sort of DSL for this but actually seeing how ChatGPT works, its going to be far more effective to have something interpret human language and write something that will trigger the APIs as and when it needs to.

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

#42
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://www.dcp.dev/

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

#43

If only crypto had started after gpt, then we would have had a clear goal of what to compute and how to incentivize the economics.

So is blockchain just an economic and architectural model to run crowdsourced things of value like GPT models? I mean it seems like a good first use case.

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

#45
post #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

Nice! Knew once I thought about it that someone had to have done it already.

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

#46
But what about something for individuals? You contribute n GPU minutes to the community adhoc pool, you get to use n minutes in parallel from said pool. Some proof of work underlying blockchain.

Just for individuals, no promises of deep data / model privacy.

Has anyone implemented something like this?

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

#47
post #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…

You'd need a good volunteer team of experts willing to shepherd it first and foremost. For it to be a volunteer team you'd need everyone to ideologically believe in the idea. They should be able to build an outline, line item wise, how each dollar is spent.

I think that will help get it started. Then swap to a non-profit monthly sub model where people are simply paying for use (pay out the cost for labor and hardware at that point only). A utility bill essentially.

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

#48
post #21
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…

There is Open Street Map (or Wikipedia for that matter). A large enough army of volunteers could produce or tag a dataset that rivals Google's data, but it would be a lot of work.

> tag a dataset that rivals Google's data

Yeah, try rival Google's Street View data.

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

#49
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://petals.ml/ seems to be headed in that direction.

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

#50

But what about something for individuals? You contribute n GPU minutes to the community adhoc pool, you get to use n minutes in parallel from said pool. Some proof of work underlying blockchain. Just for individuals, no promises of deep data / model privacy. Has anyone implemented something like this?

Check out Akash Network

https://akash.network/

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