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Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

a16z.com

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Re: Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

#41

Post by the_snooze »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #21
chis wrote: post #7

A16Z is consistently the most embarrassing VC firm at any given point in time. I guess optimistically they might be doing “outrage marketing” but it feels more like one of those places where the CEO is just an idiot and tells his employees to jump on every trend. The funny part is that they still make money. It seems like once you’ve got the connections, being a VC is a very easy job these days.

Sequoia is also increasingly embarrassing. A shame because it wasn't but 10 years ago that these firms seemed like they were leading the charge of world-changing innovation, etc...

Increasingly? This is the Sequoia who wrote thousands of words on Sam Bankman-Fried that uncritically said little more than “he’s so quirky and smart! ^_^” https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequo...

Re: Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

#42

Post by idontwantthis »

vlabakje90 wrote: post #32
perdomon wrote: post #25

How much heat does it generate and how loud is it at full tilt? Try keep comparing it to a modern under-desk computer, but I’m not sure you’d want to have that thing in the same room while you’re using it?

According to the specifications the max power draw is 1650W. All of that is converted into heat so it's like a small space heater.

It’s more than a space heater. Any heater is usually 1500w.

Re: Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

#43

Post by 827a »

In less than a year when A16z is finished with the few, pointless experiments they want to run on this and it is relegated to a closet forgotten, some poor founder is going to see it appear as part of their term sheet. "Oh, yes, $75,000 of our $500,000 commit is compensated through this state-of-the-art AI Workstation"

Re: Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

#45

Post by marcusb »

A rough price out using new egg/microcenter pricing, substituting a few items where they didn't specify a specific item/brand. I didn't bother trying to figure out what case they used.

Grand total: ~ $41,000

Motherboard https://www.newegg.com/gigabyte-mh53-g40-amd-ryzen-threadrip... $895

CPU https://www.microcenter.com/product/674313/amd-ryzen-threadr... - $3500

Cooler https://www.newegg.com/p/3C6-013W-002G6 $585

RAM https://www.newegg.com/a-tech-256gb/p/1X5-006W-00702 $1600

SSDs https://www.newegg.com/crucial-2tb-t700-nvme/p/N82E168201563... $223 x 4 = $892

GPUs https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16888892012 - $8295 x 4 = $33,180

Case https://www.newegg.com/fractal-design-atx-full-tower-north-s... $195

Power Supply https://www.newegg.com/thermaltake-toughpower-gf3-series-ps-... - $314

Re: Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

#46

Post by lostmsu »

danjl wrote: post #39

If you actually want a good multi-GPU system, just get an NVIDIA-designed system. There's no good reason to try to design and build one yourself when you will be relying almost entirely on NVIDIA cards and their multi-GPU communication.

They aren't selling one yet for the Blackwell generation.

Re: Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

#47

Post by NitpickLawyer »

refulgentis wrote: post #16
chis wrote: post #7

A16Z is consistently the most embarrassing VC firm at any given point in time. I guess optimistically they might be doing “outrage marketing” but it feels more like one of those places where the CEO is just an idiot and tells his employees to jump on every trend. The funny part is that they still make money. It seems like once you’ve got the connections, being a VC is a very easy job these days.

It's been such a mind-boggling decline in intellect, combined with really odd and intense conspiratorial behavior around crypto, that I went into a bit a few months ago. My weak, uncited, understanding from then they're poorly positioned, i.e in our set they're still the guys who write you a big check for software, but in the VC set they're a joke: i.e. they misunderstood carpet bombing investment as something that s…

> If you're inferencing, you're not getting much more out of this than you would a ~$2K Framework desktop.

I was with you up till here. Come on! CPU inferencing is not it, even macs struggle with bigger models, longer contexts (esp. visible when agentic stuff gets > 32k tokens).

The PRO6000 is the first gpu that actually makes sense to own from their "workstation" series.

Re: Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

#48

Post by lostmsu »

Can you guys make one more that I could stop by and pick up from your office (and pay for, if you care for that sort of thing)? I checked with Puget Systems, but they are only doing 3 cards max.

My only question is: why not Zen 5? No suitable motherboards?

Re: Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

#50

Post by lostmsu »

earthnail wrote: post #36
jsheard wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The technical expertise of... buying four of the fanciest Nvidia GPU and plugging them into an off-the-shelf motherboard in an off-the-shelf chassis? A serious attempt at this kind of build would use the server variant of the RTX6000 and custom air ducts to cool them efficiently, but they packed four blower coolers like sardines so it no doubt sounds like a screaming jet engine under load.

In all fairness, not even Lambda Labs offers workstations with RTX6000 server variants.

There are no RTX6000 "server" variants. These GPUs are designed for workstation use. I mean it is even in the name.
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