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Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

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Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#3

GPUs are already too expensive for gamers and now you want to do this?!

Isn't this good for gamers? They get to sell their idle gpu time and basically get a gpu for free. If he's really paying 2x more than cryptomining, this translates to paying off a gtx 1080 in a few months even taking into account electricity costs.

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#4

GPUs are already too expensive for gamers and now you want to do this?!

AI research demand is a lot easier for AMD/Nvidia to project, which allows them to ramp up production and keep prices stable.

Side note: AI research is more beneficial to society than running a few instances of Crysis 9 at 4K 120HZ.

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#5
post #3

GPUs are already too expensive for gamers and now you want to do this?!

Isn't this good for gamers? They get to sell their idle gpu time and basically get a gpu for free. If he's really paying 2x more than cryptomining, this translates to paying off a gtx 1080 in a few months even taking into account electricity costs.

How do GPU's "wear", or in other words degrade with use. I often see people stating they would not buy an ex-miner GPU because of it's hard life.

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#7
There's a lot of comments on that reddit thread about how awesome this would be as a service.

But there's a big problem of trust with this for ML.

How do I know you actually ran what I paid you for and not just generated random data that looks right in the shape I wanted it?

You could farm it out to two people and if the results disagree, then payment is decided by a third. But then you've just doubled the (paid) workload, and you've not really solved collusion by a significant portion of the workers.

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#8
post #5
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this good for gamers? They get to sell their idle gpu time and basically get a gpu for free. If he's really paying 2x more than cryptomining, this translates to paying off a gtx 1080 in a few months even taking into account electricity costs.

How do GPU's "wear", or in other words degrade with use. I often see people stating they would not buy an ex-miner GPU because of it's hard life.

>How do GPU's "wear", or in other words degrade with use. I often see people stating they would not buy an ex-miner GPU because of it's hard life.

It's kind of overblown. If you run well within the temperature and power limits they are still usually good for years at 24/7. Usually they run a bit hotter or slower because something has evaporated or slightly worn out, or maybe a fan died that needs to be replaced, but otherwise are fine.

If you are lending out your own GPUS presumably you can set a reasonable power and temperature limit.

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#9
post #7

There's a lot of comments on that reddit thread about how awesome this would be as a service. But there's a big problem of trust with this for ML. How do I know you actually ran what I paid you for and not just generated random data that looks right in the shape I wanted it? You could farm it out to two people and if the results disagree, then payment is decided by a third. But then you've just doubled the (paid) wor…

This is identical to the problem blockchain solves - hard to solve, but easy to verify. For example, if the workload is training a neural network on a set of samples it is relatively cheap verify performance on a training sample.

Alternatively you could give X% of tasks to multiple workers for cross checking. In your example X% is 100%, but it does not have to be that high.

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#10
post #7

There's a lot of comments on that reddit thread about how awesome this would be as a service. But there's a big problem of trust with this for ML. How do I know you actually ran what I paid you for and not just generated random data that looks right in the shape I wanted it? You could farm it out to two people and if the results disagree, then payment is decided by a third. But then you've just doubled the (paid) wor…

According to the website (https://vectordash.com/hosting/) they use a highly isolated Ubuntu image, so the person hosting the service shouldn't have access to the VM with your model or data on it. It would be nice if there was some third party audit of the software though, the models, the code, and even the training data can be pretty sensitive for researchers.
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