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

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171–180 of 256 posts

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

#171
post #6

The number of places where machine learning can be used effectively from both a cost perspective and a return perspective are small. They are usually tremendously large datasets at gigantic companies, and they probably have to build in house expertise because it's hard to package this up into a product and resell it for various industries, datasets, etc. Certainly something like autonomous driving needs machine learn…

“The number of places where machine learning can be used effectively from both a cost perspective and a return perspective are small.” Thankfully transfer learning and super convergence invalidates this claim. Using pre-trained models + specific training techniques significantly reduces the amount of data you need, your training time and the cost to create near state of the art models. Both Kaggle and google colab of…

> Both Kaggle and google colab offer free GPU.

I think this sentence invalidates your argument against:

“The number of places where machine learning can be used effectively from both a cost perspective and a return perspective are small.”

In a hobbyist world, free GPU time is an amazing thing, and you can do a lot of fun and rewarding projects using transfer learning and other techniques that avoid heavy engineering and data processing. In a business world, where your product must consistently and accurately perform well, problems that may be solved by ML need to be heavily scrutinized and researched, because for most problems there are cheaper, faster, more robust solutions. Free GPU time doesn't weigh in at this scale.

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

#172
post #155

I just spent $50K on coloc hardware. I'm taking a $10K/mo Azure spend down to a $1K/mo hosting cost. But the real kicker is that I get x5 the cores, x20 RAM, x10 storage, and a couple of GPUs. I'm running last-generation Infiniband (56gb/sec) and modern U.2 SSDs (say 500MB/sec per device). I figure it is going to take me about $10K in labor to move and then $1K/mo to maintain and pay for services that are bundled in…

Yes, it's quite obvious when you actually have compute needs. At my current employer, we spent about 100k to build a small single purpose hpc. One year later, I calculated the azure costs (help bargain for more servers) would have been around 1.5m. This is almost 24/7 use though, and add another ~150k in electricity.

For my own company we built out at two regionally distinct colo facilities. That worked really well and operations was efficient and costs were moderate, clearly tied to CAPEX increments which were predictable.

Recent projects have been on AWS. For a project that is roughly on the scale of our colo in terms of instances, though with aggregate lower performance, we are buying one of our colos every year. It’s insane. Network costs are particularly egregious in AWS.

But there is absolutely no way we’d be permitted to build colo facilities for many reasons and there are many reasons why even if we could get permission to do so we would choose not to due the resulting death by a thousand cuts orchestrated by the team who happens to have inserted themselves as the owner for DC/colo like things.

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

#173

I just spent $50K on coloc hardware. I'm taking a $10K/mo Azure spend down to a $1K/mo hosting cost. But the real kicker is that I get x5 the cores, x20 RAM, x10 storage, and a couple of GPUs. I'm running last-generation Infiniband (56gb/sec) and modern U.2 SSDs (say 500MB/sec per device). I figure it is going to take me about $10K in labor to move and then $1K/mo to maintain and pay for services that are bundled in…

I'm sure your right for your case. But I'd add one caveat for those less experienced: if you own the hardware, you need to be prepared to go to the colo when something breaks. The various clouds are a much nicer experience when hardware fails. At the very least people should have enough spare capacity that a hardware failure means going sometime in the next couple of weeks, rather than getting up at 3 am and fixing t…

Operations teams deal with both. You design your system with enough spare capacity that you can live somewhat degraded for a time - you must if only due to the lead time. Software failures are far far far more common than hardware failures so once you combine these, the occasional midnight trip to the colo is both rare and oddly satisfying for hero types.

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

#174

I just spent $50K on coloc hardware. I'm taking a $10K/mo Azure spend down to a $1K/mo hosting cost. But the real kicker is that I get x5 the cores, x20 RAM, x10 storage, and a couple of GPUs. I'm running last-generation Infiniband (56gb/sec) and modern U.2 SSDs (say 500MB/sec per device). I figure it is going to take me about $10K in labor to move and then $1K/mo to maintain and pay for services that are bundled in…

What colo company did you use?

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

#175
post #7

I wrote an article I published a week ago about how AI is the biggest misnomer in tech history https://medium.com/@seibelj/the-artificial-intelligence-scam... I wrote it to be tongue-in-cheek in a ranting style, but essentially "AI" businesses and the technology underpinning it are not the silver bullet the media and marketing hype has made it out to be. The linked article about a16z shows how AI is the same story ev…

Coming from a fellow masshole: that's a great rant. There was this meme in the 70s about "self driving cars" following magnetic strips in the road in restricted highways. I remember at the time, being, like 8 and thinking "sure seems like an overly complicated train."

Thanks man! Lifelong masshole here.

Your post was much better than mine, but I appreciate the comment.

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

#176
post #5

>That’s right; that’s why a lone wolf like me, or a small team can do as good or better a job than some firm with 100x the head count and 100m in VC backing. goes on to say >I agree, but the hockey stick required for VC backing, and the army of Ph.D.s required to make it work doesn’t really mix well with those limited domains, which have a limited market. Choose one? Also assumes running your own data center to be ea…

I ran a small data cluster for years, the horsepower behind my startup. Other than the Chinese DDoS attacks, running the cluster was absolutely elementary. The idea that running a server or a band of servers is difficult is a bold faced lie. People have got to stop repeating the cloud propaganda.

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

#177
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's quite obvious when you actually have compute needs. At my current employer, we spent about 100k to build a small single purpose hpc. One year later, I calculated the azure costs (help bargain for more servers) would have been around 1.5m. This is almost 24/7 use though, and add another ~150k in electricity.

For my own company we built out at two regionally distinct colo facilities. That worked really well and operations was efficient and costs were moderate, clearly tied to CAPEX increments which were predictable. Recent projects have been on AWS. For a project that is roughly on the scale of our colo in terms of instances, though with aggregate lower performance, we are buying one of our colos every year. It’s insane.…

Yes, cloud costs are the cost of having poor internal management, such that inefficiency and incompetence reigns unchallenged. The enormous cost differential is unfortunately borne by the unit doing the work, rather than the one preventing it from being done efficiently.

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

#178

I just spent $50K on coloc hardware. I'm taking a $10K/mo Azure spend down to a $1K/mo hosting cost. But the real kicker is that I get x5 the cores, x20 RAM, x10 storage, and a couple of GPUs. I'm running last-generation Infiniband (56gb/sec) and modern U.2 SSDs (say 500MB/sec per device). I figure it is going to take me about $10K in labor to move and then $1K/mo to maintain and pay for services that are bundled in…

I ran a ML based 3D reconstruction service for 7 years - given face photos of a person, reconstruct a realistic 3D likeness. I licensed a finished 3D reconstruction algorithm, purchased $50K worth of servers plus a federal reserve bank quality hardware firewall, and put it all in a Los Angeles downtown co-lo (the former Enron data center, actually.) I paid $600 a month to run that, as opposed to the equal compute cap…

(I don't think people like the gratuitous imaging generated by that last sentance. Much too real.)

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

#179

So, way back in the last millenium, I did my Master's thesis (way smaller deal than a Ph.D. thesis) on neural networks. Since then, I have looked in on it every few years. I think they're cool, I like using them, and writing multi-level backpropagation neural networks used to be one of the first things I'd do in a new language, just to get a feel for how it worked (until pytorch came along and I decided for the first…

Thank you for the perspective. Now when we talk machine learning are we talking: L. Pachter and B. Sturmfels. Algebraic Statistics for Computational Biology. Cambridge University Press 2005. G. Pistone, E. Riccomango, H. P. Wynn. Algebraic Statistics. CRC Press, 2001. Drton, Mathias, Sturmfels, Bernd, Sullivant, Seth. Lectures on Algebraic Statistics, Springer 2009. Or more like: Watanabe, Sumio. Algebraic Geometry a…

Pure CS based AI approaches are primarily for Image, Text, and maybe graphs and control. The domains are called computer vision, natural language processing, graph learning and reinforcement learning

Structured Data like tables, time series etc the techniques are still from statistics. Regression for example is the workhorse for numerical prediction problems

I think a lot of people are missing the point about leaps AI has made because they aren't aware of NLP or CV or reinforcement learning.

So "AI" mentioned above is stunningly good for buses in 1MM image and reasonably good drug trial, cern data.

The business models required for making AI business successful haven't been invented yet.

Good AI model will be Deep stack : example would be something like precision agriculture where you'd use AI for designing rice then use iot and earth observation to locate right acreages and monitor growth and adjust nutrient at crop level and get dramatically great output with least wastage and highest nutritional content.

Most AI companies are still started by ex CS folks who in general arent aware of deep technical opportunities in other disciplines. I think this will change soon very fast due to ubiquity of deep learning training material, libraries and research papers.

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