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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

#251

Post by artaak »

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…

Could you cite an example where ECC requirement on GPU was real and demonstrated to be needed? In practice, I don't know anyone who'd willfully take 10-15% perf hit on GPUs, because of a cosmic ray.

The thermal design for "datacenter" card can be better for sure. And on-board memory size and design. That's about it. For how many x over geforce price tag is that?

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

#252

Post by fncypants »

jeremysalwen wrote: post #184
yogrish wrote: post #118

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.

Props to the ML community for being so open.

Open does not mean patent-free.

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

#253

Post by endorphone »

artaak wrote: post #251
endorphone wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Could you cite an example where ECC requirement on GPU was real and demonstrated to be needed? In practice, I don't know anyone who'd willfully take 10-15% perf hit on GPUs, because of a cosmic ray. The thermal design for "datacenter" card can be better for sure. And on-board memory size and design. That's about it. For how many x over geforce price tag is that?

"In practice, I don't know anyone who'd willfully take 10-15% perf hit on GPUs, because of a cosmic ray."

Virtually every server in data centers runs on ECC: the notion of not using it is simply absurd. And given that the Tesla V100 gets 900GB/s of memory bandwidth with ECC, versus 616GB/s of memory bandwidth on the 2080Ti without ECC, it's a strawman to begin with.

nvidia further states that there is zero performance penalty for ECC.

As to whether the requirement is "real", Google did an analysis where they found their ECC memory corrected a bit error every 14 to 40 hours per gigabit.

"That's about it."

Also ECC memory. Also dramatically higher double precision performance. Dramatically higher tensor performance. Aside from all of that...that's it.

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

#254

Post by edw »

rbinv wrote: post #248
edw wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The boring low-risk unsexy thing that works is often underrated. I didn't choose CF — at the time I argued that it was a tool for scrubs, but the VPE said, "Hey, I know it, and I know it can do the job." We launched that CF-based web site on time and sold the company for $350MM fewer than six months later. Only then did we incrementally port it to Java.

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

#255

Post by mengibar10 »

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…

So, not a scaleable idea in the sense that not many companies can or would implement it anyway.
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