Ask HN: Can you crowdfund the compute for GPT?

Post by latchkey » Thu, Jan 12, 2023, 3:53 PM UTC

smoldesu wrote: post #29

alexb_ wrote: 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…

Company Alpha will probably just call up AWS or Azure and sleep easy. Company Beta can't really compete because they have to pay both themselves and their contributors; AWS could sell ML compute at-cost and still turn a profit. What made this type of business feasible/attractive for cryptocurrency is that the miners were Company Beta. There wasn't two mouths to feed or two pockets to line, just a direct and transpare…

Post by smoldesu » Thu, Jan 12, 2023, 3:55 PM UTC

humanizersequel wrote: post #81

smoldesu wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Company Alpha will probably just call up AWS or Azure and sleep easy. Company Beta can't really compete because they have to pay both themselves and their contributors; AWS could sell ML compute at-cost and still turn a profit. What made this type of business feasible/attractive for cryptocurrency is that the miners were Company Beta. There wasn't two mouths to feed or two pockets to line, just a direct and transpare…

>AWS could sell ML compute at-cost and still turn a profit How? Definitionally, they wouldn't be turning a profit.

Post by cocochanel » Thu, Jan 12, 2023, 4:00 PM UTC

cuuupid wrote: post #39

alexb_ wrote: 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…

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 12, 2023, 4:03 PM UTC

cuuupid wrote: post #39

alexb_ wrote: 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…

Post by oliwary » Thu, Jan 12, 2023, 4:10 PM UTC

beernet wrote: 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…