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Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

techcrunch.com

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Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#191

Post by simonbarker87 »

explaininjs wrote: post #169
danielvaughn wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in a couple of emergency rooms for a total of 6 years, and you aren't wrong. Assuming the care you need can be entirely performed within the ER, then that's a viable strategy so long as you don't intend to re-visit the hospital. Hospitals are obligated to provide care regardless of your ability to pay in the moment, and of course they often take care of indigent and foreign patients, with the understanding t…

I have a friend that incurred massive medical debts in college when their (college-provided) insurance refused to cover services rendered at the (college) hospital. The college then made all sorts of threats like “you won’t be able to graduate until this $$,$$$ bill is paid!!!”. Keep in mind my friend was only able to attend college on a full scholarship as a result of coming from a poor ESL family. They ignored all…

As the old saying goes “If I owe you $100 it’s my problem, if I owe you $100,000 … it’s your problem”

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#192

Post by jimjimjim »

krisoft wrote: post #184
doctorpangloss wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People complain about this relentlessly, but never change. Additionally, every single business owner I know complains that whatever it is they're selling, (1) it isn't worth the brain damage to sell to customers looking for the lowest price, (2) as long as people comparison shop in a harebrained way, hook pricing (aka up front pricing that looks low and turns out high) is only rational. It's not like they're providin…

> People complain about this relentlessly, but never change What do you mean by this? How would “people change” to get out of resort fees or confusing pricing systems?

"people" as a group need to stop shopping solely on price. Btw, You may look at other factors but as a general rule "people" look at price.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#193

Post by buildbot »

zeroxfe wrote: post #44
matsz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is precisely why I stick to dedicated servers for my own personal projects. $40/month for a machine, doesn't get any more predictable than this.

There's no way you're getting a machine for $40/month. :-) Did you mean a dedicated VM or VPS? (I have a bunch of actual dedicated machines with different providers, and this would save me a lot of money.) (Edit: holy moly those prices are fantastic!)

I'm renting a box from Hetzner - 4x 22tb HD, 2x 1.5TB NVME SSD, Ryzen 3600, 64gb ecc ram... for 100$ per month! It's nice :)

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#194

Post by jameshart »

eddd-ddde wrote: post #102
zeroxfe wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no way you're getting a machine for $40/month. :-) Did you mean a dedicated VM or VPS? (I have a bunch of actual dedicated machines with different providers, and this would save me a lot of money.) (Edit: holy moly those prices are fantastic!)

Also a dedicated VM is /literally/ a dedicated machine. It's in the name!

A dedicated virtual machine is a kind of dedicated machine, sure. Like a private community swimming pool is a kind of private swimming pool.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#195

Post by ec109685 »

maxchehab wrote: post #110

Both Core Weave & Lambda Labs have fairly predatory pricing making it impossible to rent GPUs without a yearly contract. This doesn't make sense for training models, where a training run is on the scale of days & weeks. I wished that the techcrunch article mentioned other companies, like sfcompute, which offer hourly compute instead of yearly contracts.

That would make the TechCrunch article highly misleading since AWS and the other clouds offer big savings for reserved instances.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#196

Post by TechDebtDevin »

jameshart wrote: post #189
ryandrake wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems like AWS' entire business model is making the pricing so confusing that you don't know what it will cost until after you've used it. It feels weirdly similar to the US healthcare/insurance situation. Not just the healthcare situation, but everything. There's nothing much more stereotypically American than "not knowing what you're going to pay for something until you're billed." Dozens of little fees on you…

Then pay for it with a credit card that gives you a random amount of cash back, and pay your credit card bill using your tax refund that came as a nice surprise at the end of the year, because you over withheld all year so you don’t actually even know what your real take home pay is supposed to be. No wonder Americans have no idea how the economy is doing.

I'm always surprised by people who expect and are excited for their refund. Half the country is pitching about politicians taxation plans when all the while they're volunteering to overpay out of every paycheck.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#197

Post by diob »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #52
ryandrake wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems like AWS' entire business model is making the pricing so confusing that you don't know what it will cost until after you've used it. It feels weirdly similar to the US healthcare/insurance situation. Not just the healthcare situation, but everything. There's nothing much more stereotypically American than "not knowing what you're going to pay for something until you're billed." Dozens of little fees on you…

People complain about this relentlessly, but never change. Additionally, every single business owner I know complains that whatever it is they're selling, (1) it isn't worth the brain damage to sell to customers looking for the lowest price, (2) as long as people comparison shop in a harebrained way, hook pricing (aka up front pricing that looks low and turns out high) is only rational. It's not like they're providin…

This is why other countries just have laws for this, it evens the playing field and removes the bs.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#198

Post by silverquiet »

pjlegato wrote: post #187
silverquiet wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live in Texas.

Sounds like your issue is with Texas, then, not with America. Why perpetuate crude and inaccurate stereotypes that smear and disparage America in general? America is spending a huge amount of money every year precisely on providing healthcare for the poor. Besides which, it looks like Medicaid does indeed operate in Texas, which is discoverable in less than 10 seconds of Internet searching: https://www.hhs.texas.gov/…

Have you considered perhaps that because I live in Texas, I know a bit more about those programs than you who have just googled and linked the top results? And that perhaps because I live in Texas, I indeed have issues with Texas (still a part of America in spite of the wishes of some on the right wing)?

From your own article (I knew this stat would be in there):

> Currently, Texas leads the nation in the number of uninsured residents with nearly 5 million people living here without health insurance coverage, nearly double the national average.

Why do you think so many are uninsured if it is so simple for them to get health coverage?

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#199

Post by benwaffle »

indigodaddy wrote: post #95
zackangelo wrote: post #46

Would like to take a moment to recommend fly.io for GPU workloads. I've been building a prototype using them for the last couple of weeks and it's been great to use. I didn't have to jump through any hoops or apply for any quota adjustments to get started. And I especially appreciate how easy they make it to automatically scale your GPU instances to zero based on traffic.

Wow that is quite decent pricing actually. This makes me want to try to deploy something like llamafile/ollama or similar to fly.io+gpu for my personal on-demand llama/llm whims. (@simonw I’m looking at you— I feel like if you haven’t already done this on fly.io, that you’re probably thinking about it :) ) Seems private enough.. could throw some basic auth on top of it for me and trusted friends/family so I don’t get…

We've got a one-liner for spinning up your own ollama UI. See https://github.com/fly-apps/ollama-open-webui

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#200

Post by dangrossman »

notaustinpowers wrote: post #185
dangrossman wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obamacare is not a plan, it's a law that set minimum standards for health insurance plans, created marketplaces to cross-shop plans across providers on a single website, and created a system where you can receive government subsidies towards their cost if your income is low enough. At $45K, you would receive subsidies towards your insurance premiums. I've bought my insurance on the ACA marketplace since it opened ten…

I use Obamacare in the rural southern way, referencing ACA and healthcare.gov, lol. I'm also in Georgia which may have different regulations regarding the deductibles. I remember looking at the plans around 2 years ago and realizing that there was no way I could afford the premium, let alone the yearly deductible. I just took another quick look at a non-Healthcare.gov site. Insurance for me would be $313/month with a…

You get an annual doctor visit for free with any insurance plan. There is no deductible or copay. There are other categories that are covered with no deductible. My wife had a $13,000 IUD insertion under anesthesia at a hospital due to complications, and this cost her $0 with insurance, without having met her deductible, since reproductive health is covered with no out of pocket cost under all ACA plans.

I'm on healthcare.gov looking at Georgia's plans this year for someone with $45K of income. You have options starting at $129/month. Many of these sub-$200 plans get you doctors visits for $40-60, prescription drugs for under $25 each, mental health treatment for under $60 per visit. This is all without hitting your deductible at all, they're day 1 prices.

If you paid the cash prices for many of these doctors, specialists, therapists, they'd be many times higher than the insurance negotiated costs. Look under the "covered costs" estimates for things like mental health treatment, diabetes maintenance, broken bone treatment, etc and you'll see that the estimated annual cost for the insured is often half or less the plan's deductible -- which tells you that hitting the deductible is not when the savings start. I don't think my wife or I have ever hit our out-of-pocket maximums in a year, yet the insurance has saved us more than it's cost in most years.

You're going to start interacting with the healthcare system a lot more than you have in your 20s once you're in your 30s. We all do at that age. And if you have even the worst ACA plan, you'll start to understand what it's doing for you regardless of the deductible.

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