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Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height

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Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height

#111

Post by streetcat1 »

fxtentacle wrote: post #58
m0zg wrote: post #8

"Huge compute bills" usually come from training, or to be more precise, hyperparameter search that's required before you find a model that works well. You could also fail to find such a model, but that's another discussion. So yeah, you could spend one or two FTE salaries' (or one deep learning PhD's) worth of cash on finding such models for your startup if you insist on helping Jeff Bezos to wipe his tears with cris…

No, also inference is quite expensive. You'll have 100% usage on a $10,000 GPU for 3s per customer image for a decently sized optical flow network. That's 3 hours of compute time for 1 minute of 60fps video. Now let's say your customer wants to analyze 2 hours = 120 minutes of video and doesn't want to wait more than those 3 hours, then suddenly you need 120 servers with one $10k GPU each to service this one customer…

I am not sure what you are doing, but can you just compute the similarity between two frames, and analyze only the novel frames?

I.e. I think that in one minute video, 95% of your images do not have new information in them

Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height

#112

Post by streetcat1 »

fxtentacle wrote: post #64
pridkett wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s also the issue that data scientists often want to go running to hyperparameter optimization and neural architecture search. In most cases improving your data pipelines and ensuring the data are clean and efficient will pay off much more quickly.

But manually improving the data pipeline requires an understanding of the problem, whereas doing a hyperparameter optimized architecture search just needs $$$ hardware and no clue on the side of the operator.

Of course, you can also automatically search the best data pipeline for your data...

Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height

#113

Post by nl »

derefr wrote: post #69
fxtentacle wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But manually improving the data pipeline requires an understanding of the problem, whereas doing a hyperparameter optimized architecture search just needs $$$ hardware and no clue on the side of the operator.

Or, to put that another way: if you knew what algorithm the AI would be using to discriminate the signal from the noise in your data, why would you need the AI? Just write that algorithm.

That's not the same thing at all.

You can't build hand-build a feature detector as accurate as (say) a ResNet50 by hand. Before 2014 people tried to do this with feature detectors like SIFT and HOG. These were patented and made the inventors significant money. If it was still possible to do it then someone would be and making profit from it.

Hyperparameter search is just optimising the training parameters (things like batch size, or optimiser parameters). This might give another 1% lift on accuracy, but isn't generally a significant factor.

Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height

#114

Post by roel_v »

m0zg wrote: post #53
buckminster wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once had a borrowed Sun blade server in my home office. The fan in it sounded like an industrial vacuum cleaner. It got moved to a different room and was powered on as little as possible. Your plan makes sense but be mindful of the acoustics or your devs may grow to hate you.

BTW, the only reason why consumer vacuum cleaners are so loud is because consumers associate loudness with suction power. "Backpack" style commercial vacuum cleaners have more suction, and are barely audible in comparison.

I don't know about backpack style vacuums (the few I've seen seem plenty loud), but the idea that manufacturers deliberately create loud vacuums to make them seem more powerful is ridiculous. There is an entire market segment of vacuums that are marketed as 'quiet', so there is plenty of demand for quiet vacuums. There is simply a trade off between suction / loudness / price, and various models make different trade offs (corresponding to various points in the market).

Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height

#115

Post by webel0 »

paulddraper wrote: post #94
m0zg wrote: post #8

"Huge compute bills" usually come from training, or to be more precise, hyperparameter search that's required before you find a model that works well. You could also fail to find such a model, but that's another discussion. So yeah, you could spend one or two FTE salaries' (or one deep learning PhD's) worth of cash on finding such models for your startup if you insist on helping Jeff Bezos to wipe his tears with cris…

> Also, if your startup is venture funded, AWS will give you $100K in credit AFAIK that is limited to <$20k and it expires.

We got $100k but boy oh boy once you’re on it it’s hard to get off. Now we’re close to 50-50 gcloud/aws

Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height

#116

Post by walshemj »

m0zg wrote: post #8

"Huge compute bills" usually come from training, or to be more precise, hyperparameter search that's required before you find a model that works well. You could also fail to find such a model, but that's another discussion. So yeah, you could spend one or two FTE salaries' (or one deep learning PhD's) worth of cash on finding such models for your startup if you insist on helping Jeff Bezos to wipe his tears with cris…

Yep if you getting huge bills you should be doing on prem HPC eg where a 15k budget means 15kw per container and your into exotic network designs where 10g wont cut it any more.

eg from 2011 6400 Hadoop nodes like http://bradhedlund.com/2011/11/05/hadoop-network-design-chal...

God only knows what fun you could get up to with modern tech - I miss bleeding edge rnd

Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height

#117

Post by xemdetia »

bob1029 wrote: post #104
blt wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I worked from home and my employer asked me to install a server in my home, I would tell them to go fuck themselves. It's noisy, it takes up space, and presumably I'm on call to fix it if it breaks. You should pay them an extra 24x(PSU wattage)x(peak $/Wh in area) per day for the electricity too. I'm alarmed that someone in your company felt this idea was appropriate enough to propose.

We would certainly compensate employees. I didn't feel it appropriate to disclose every last detail regarding the arrangement in a thread which is only tangentially-related to the OP. This was my idea. I am a developer in my company. We are a flat structure. We have a lot of respect for each other. I am on a standup with the CEO every day. We all believe in our product and would happily participate in whatever activi…

I think it was funny to presume that the employer wouldn't pay for it. At one of my old roles I had a second laptop I used solely for VMs just because I ran out of space on primary workstation. A simple fix orders of magnitude cheaper for a developer compared to more ESXi or cloud hardware.

Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height

#118

Post by yogrish »

Now a days DL models are becoming commodities very fast. By the time you train NN to solve a particular problem, a new efficient model is out somewhere and is available public. So you need to go through the process entirely or else you risk losing business. Unless your NN is so unique like you are handcrafting your own in which case you take lot of time to arrive at a best model and you need more PhDs.

Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height

#119

Post by ColanR »

ggm wrote: post #66
buckminster wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stand corrected. It was much louder than a consumer vacuum but my analogy skills are weak.

Your analogy skills were strong, because analogy is rooted in myth, not fact. Achilles did not actually have an Achilles tendon because Achilles did not exist There does not have to be an increadibly loud functional industrial vacuum cleaner, for figuratively everyone to get your analogy, because the Herculean reality of vacuum cleaners is that you cannot clean an augean stable of lego on the floor, without a lot of…

To continue the pedantry, I don't think we know for sure that Achilles didn't exist. Troy certainly did, and we have the Iliad to thank for knowing to look for it.

Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height

#120

Post by dnautics »

endorphone wrote: post #54
ThePadawan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Datacenter GPUs are mostly identical to the much cheaper consumer versions. The only thing preventing you from running a datacenter with consumer hardware is the licensing agreement you accept.

"The only thing preventing you from running a datacenter with consumer hardware is the licensing agreement you accept." The consumer cards don't use ECC and memory errors are a common issue (GDDR6 running at the edge of its capabilities). In a gaming situation that means a polygon might be wrong, a visual glitch occurs, a texture isn't rendered right -- things that just don't matter. For scientific purposes that same…

> For scientific purposes that same glitch could be catastrophic.

But for machine learning, some say that stochasticity improves convergence times!

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