Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by xyzzyz » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 7:46 PM UTC

eyegor wrote: post #146

liuliu wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been playing with custom-built 2080 Ti workstation for a while: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF3JYEIsjH8 Several issues: 1. electricity bill is still an issue, I've been paying anywhere between $500 to $1000 per month for this workstation (always have something to train). 2. something with a decent memory size (Titan RTX and RTX 8000) cost way too much; 3. once you reached a point of 4-2080Ti-is-not-fast-enou…

10gbe will depend on the workload. In general, I'd assume it's fine because it takes a parallel raid setup to saturate. Upgrading to 100gbe is pretty unreasonable cost wise unless you buy network gear from a back alley van dealer. Although once you reach 4 2080ti, you ought to consider switching to a titanium grade psu and rewiring if you're in a 100-120v country. If you're feeling cheap, just steal the phases from t…

If you're feeling cheap, just steal the phases from two different circuits.

I chukled, but more seriously, if you can't rewire your house to get a normal 240V circuit, you should not be fucking around with hacks like above.

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

#242

Post by nl » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 10:30 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #234

nl wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> But manually improving the data pipeline requires an understanding of the problem > 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. My point is that this isn't the same thing at all. Say your problem is plant detection from mobile phone photos. I can understand everything abou…

> True, but no one has made that argument. Er, yes, I did, in my original post. The form you quoted was me attempting to be more precise in rephrasing it. My point—my original point, this whole time—was that applying an advanced “feature extraction” algorithm to a data source whose features are explicitly encoded in a lossless, linearly-recoverable way in the data—what we usually call structured data—is silly. For ex…

> Er, yes, I did, in my original post. The form you quoted was me attempting to be more precise in rephrasing it.

Ok. No one other than yourself has made that argument.

> Scraping social network data? It’s already a graph, and it often already has annotation fields in the JSON graph endpoints describing the relationships between the members. If you don’t just stop and look at the dataset, you might think your feature-extractor is doing something very clever, when actually it’s just finding the explicit pre-chewed “relationship” field and spitting it back out at you.

I've worked in this exact field, and I've never ever heard of anyone who doesn't do this. I guess someone might.. so if your point is that there are dumb people around then ok.

But that isn't what a feature extractor does! In the graph context a simple feature extractor is something hand coded like the degree of a node, or a more complex learned one is something that maybe does embedding.

If your point is that people should understand their data, then yes that is in data science 101 for good reasons.

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

#243

Post by StreamBright » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 10:44 PM UTC

joshuaellinger wrote: post #76

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…

Network redundancy, electricity redundancy, bandwidth included? Otherwise, it is a bit of apples to oranges. What about firewalls? I mean you could ignore all that and say you only need raw computing power. On the k8s note, nobody is forcing you to use k8s on the top of Azure.

Now do the calculation for ongoing operations for 5 years, taking into consideration normal hardware failure and maintenance cost. You need to swap out old hardware to get a new CPU, etc. I have tried to use co-loc vs cloud for ~100 nodes and cloud won, by 30%.

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

#244

Post by StreamBright » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 10:51 PM UTC

Merrill wrote: post #226

joshuaellinger wrote: post #76

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…

This whole topic recapitulates all the arguments for business units acquiring and operating their own servers versus continuing to suffer the internal bill-backs from the corporate data center. Some of the same caveats apply with respect to software updates, configuration control, security, availability, business continuity, disaster recovery, and what happens if the local admin is hit by a bus.

Exactly. These examples are mostly apples to oranges comparisons. I have worked over 20 years in OPS and it is really hard to do cheaper than AWS ____in the long run___. If you are unlucky and bought a batch of SSDs that are faulty exactly 1 month after warranty expires or you have downtime because of other low-level reasons that AWS shields you from, your co-loc cost can quickly go up. I don't even want to go into networking hoops, that is a whole different problem to deal with global network vendors. If you can be sure you never run into these, or your business is resiliant to these sort of problems, or you have a dedicated highly skilled team (like dropbox) than co-loc might be a good idea. Otherwise it is pretty damn hard.

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

#245

Post by perl4ever » Tue, Feb 25, 2020, 11:04 PM UTC

nl wrote: post #187

perl4ever wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There would be no gain from using ML in RDBMS query planning. It's regular data; the AI's trained model would just be a recapitulation of the query-planning algorithm we already have." Most of what you wrote seems fine, until I got to this. A query optimizer seems like something that tends to be very opaque, very complex, and in my experience blows up without a good explanation frequently in typical situations. It's…

Most (?) RDBMS query planners rely on updating statistics on the data in the table to decide what type of joins to perform. I can imagine cases (distributed databases, different speed storage) where it would make sense to test the queries and learn which optimisations make sense. It'd be self tuning and able to adapt to changing hardware.

Oracle certainly has statistics and incredibly sophisticated optimization in theory, it's just that in practice, I think it sucks.

I spent way too many years writing ad hoc Oracle SQL that had to complete within a few hours and trying to guess if the optimizer had decided to finish in 15 minutes or a week.

And I would read Tom Kyte where he says obviously your database is set up wrong if the optimizer isn't working for you. And how you should do everything in one big beautiful query that uses all the latest features of Oracle.

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

#246

Post by magwa101 » Wed, Feb 26, 2020, 1:43 AM UTC

Here's what cloud gives you that is very costly to implement internally, cost accountability. Analysts running the same queries over and over would peg internal hardware all the time. When we went to the cloud, we made a budget for each division, problem solved. Same with DS. Give them a blank check, they'll spend it, manage to a budget, they'll do it.

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

#247

Post by ggm » Wed, Feb 26, 2020, 8:00 AM UTC

ColanR wrote: post #235

ggm wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we have Schliemann to thank, for digging through it in his lust for anachronistically Indy-Jonesing the archeology. Troy only exists because Schliemann stole the gold. Otherwise its just some hill in Turkey.

I know the story...Schliemann went looking for Troy because the Illiad told him it existed.

Didn't work on Ararat. False in unum, false in omnibus. Anyway, he went to the wrong hill first. But overall yes, myth informs reality sometimes. Shame he didn't find the bones of the giant wooden platypus the Greek ice cream salesmen hid in.

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

#248

Post by rbinv » Wed, Feb 26, 2020, 11:38 AM UTC

edw wrote: post #233

rbinv wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CGI to ColdFusion to Java servlets. Sounds enterprise-y.

It was all very start-uppy. What were you using to build your commercial web applications in 1996 if not CGI? Mod_perl did not even exist until 1995, and FastCGI didn't exist IIRC until after Netscape released their enterprise server.

Huh. I agree with CGI, but CF certainly had alternatives.

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

#249

Post by Piskvorrr » Wed, Feb 26, 2020, 1:52 PM UTC

6510 wrote: post #240

killjoywashere wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a modern ML system should just plug into the business process from day 0, where the ML task should be performed by human and recorded by the machine. Ah, this is a typical thing I hear people in the Valley say: just push it all ... somewhere. No. If we digitized all microscopy slides, it would require YouTube-scale storage several times over. People think genomics is big. People think reconnaissance imaging is big.…

Funny, we all thought computers were fast. Turns out its nowhere what we need.

They're fast, sure. But not very efficient in certain problem domains, specificially where humans are efficient (for reasons that are IMHO historical, not innate).

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

#250

Post by maremp » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 2:37 AM UTC

bob1029 wrote: post #70

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.

Excellent point. If we are building these rigs by hand (which is a likely option considering the initial usage context), the cooling solution would probably be a Noctua NH-U14S or similar. I already have one of these in my office attached to a 2950X and it is dead silent. You can definitely hear it when every core is pegged, but it's hardly noticeable over any other arbitrary workstation. The sound is nowhere near as…

What you’re saying sounds like a PC custom build enthusiast. I respect that, I like it too.

Please be mindful of the fact that consumer products are not designed for the workstation/server type of load. It’s related to why the hardware is cheaper compared to the server hardware. Also, the consumer ISP connection is most likely not as reliable as that of a data center. I’m working remotely from home and I experienced this many times, bad performance in peak times or a half of a day of downtime can happen, without any warning. And account for maintenance, everyone on the team must be able to figure out a problem or deal with getting someone else in to fix it.

I know I sound like a buzzkill. I am writing this with good intentions.

Even if this works right now, it’s not a reliable long-term solution. Maybe instead of dumping a couple of grand on consumer PCs to handle server’s work, look into building a proper server. Or you could find a datacenter provider to rent their hardware, something that is not as shiny and full of features like AWS.