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We were wrong about GPUs

fly.io

61–70 of 604 posts

Re: We were wrong about GPUs

#61

It's really a shame GPU slices aren't a thing -- a monthly cost of $1k for "a GPU" is just so far outside of what I could justify. I guess it's not terrible if I can batch-schedule a mega-gpu for an hour a day to catch up on tasks, but then I'm basically still looking at nearly $50/month. I don't know exactly what type of cloud offering would satisfy my needs, but what's funny is that attaching an AMD consumer GPU to…

This is what services like Vast.ai are for - super cheap GPUs you just use as long as you need etc etc.

Re: We were wrong about GPUs

#62
> A whole enterprise A100 is a compromise position for them; they want an SXM cluster of H100s.

For a lot of use-cases you need at lest two A100s with a very fast interconnect, potentially many more. This isn't even about scaling with requests but about running one single LLM instance.

Sure you will find all of ways how people managed to runt his or that on smaller platforms, problem is that quite often doesn't scale to what is needed in production for a lot of subtle and less subtle reasons.

Re: We were wrong about GPUs

#63

I shelled out for a 4090 when they came out thinking it would be the key factor for running local llms. It turns out that anything worth running takes way more than 24GB VRAM. I would have been better off with 2+ 3090s and a custom power supply. It’s a pity because I thought it would be a great solution for coding and a home assistant, but performance and quality isn’t there yet for small models (afaik). Perhaps DIGI…

The best bang for the buck on VRAM is a maxed out Mac Studio.

Re: We were wrong about GPUs

#64

I'm admittedly a complete LLM noob, so my question might not even make sense. Or it might exist and I haven't found it quite yet. But have they considered pivoting some of said compute to some 'private, secure LLM in a box' solution? I've lately been toying with the idea of training from extensive docs and code, some open, some not, for both code generation and insights. I went down the RAG rabbit hole, and frankly,…

The problem is currently all the "competing" ideas have a ton of tradeoffs and is rarely one size fits all. Furthermore, it's not clear if the idea you choose will be become obsolete by the underlying model architecture getting better. On top of all that, you are essentially competing with Anthropic/OpenAI/Google, where your only advantage is "privacy". Anyone who deeply cares about privacy, and is willing to pay for it, may just likely do it on their own (especially if your CTO is pouting money into "investing" in AI). Anyone who doesn't will likely not want to 6-7 months behind what you can get at OpenAI or Google.

Re: We were wrong about GPUs

#65
post #22

Not sure about this: > like with our portfolio of IPv4 addresses, I’m even more comfortable making bets backed by tradable assets with durable value. Is that referencing the gpus, the hardware? If yes, why should they have a durable value? Historically hardware like that deprecated fast and reaches a value of 0, energy efficiency alone kills e.g. old server hardware. Something different here?

I think it's referencing only the IPv4 block, but it is a bit confusing. It doesn't make sense to be ref'ing the GPUs because their value is definitely not durable.

Re: We were wrong about GPUs

#66
> The biggest problem: developers don’t want GPUs. They don’t even want AI/ML models. They want LLMs. System engineers may have smart, fussy opinions on how to get their models loaded with CUDA, and what the best GPU is. But software developers don’t care about any of that. When a software developer shipping an app comes looking for a way for their app to deliver prompts to an LLM, you can’t just give them a GPU.

I'm increasingly coming to the view that there is a big split among "software developers" and AI is exacerbating it. There's an (increasingly small) group of software developers who don't like "magic" and want to understand where their code is running and what it's doing. These developers gravitate toward open source solutions like Kubernetes, and often just want to rent a VPS or at most a managed K8s solution. The other group (increasingly large) just wants to `git push` and be done with it, and they're willing to spend a lot of (usually their employer's) money to have that experience. They don't want to have to understand DNS, linux, or anything else beyond whatever framework they are using.

A company like fly.io absolutely appeals to the latter. GPU instances at this point are very much appealing to the former. I think you have to treat these two markets very differently from a marketing and product perspective. Even though they both write code, they are otherwise radically different. You can sell the latter group a lot of abstractions and automations without them needing to know any details, but the former group will care very much about the details.

Re: We were wrong about GPUs

#67
post #22

Not sure about this: > like with our portfolio of IPv4 addresses, I’m even more comfortable making bets backed by tradable assets with durable value. Is that referencing the gpus, the hardware? If yes, why should they have a durable value? Historically hardware like that deprecated fast and reaches a value of 0, energy efficiency alone kills e.g. old server hardware. Something different here?

I think it's referencing only the IPv4 block, but it is a bit confusing. It doesn't make sense to be ref'ing the GPUs because their value is definitely not durable.

I don't know about "durable", but they're not written off. There is absolutely a market for all this hardware.

Re: We were wrong about GPUs

#68

It's really a shame GPU slices aren't a thing -- a monthly cost of $1k for "a GPU" is just so far outside of what I could justify. I guess it's not terrible if I can batch-schedule a mega-gpu for an hour a day to catch up on tasks, but then I'm basically still looking at nearly $50/month. I don't know exactly what type of cloud offering would satisfy my needs, but what's funny is that attaching an AMD consumer GPU to…

This is what services like Vast.ai are for - super cheap GPUs you just use as long as you need etc etc.

Hmm, that looks interesting -- I might have to explore a bit. The low-end GPU pricing is pretty competitive.

Re: We were wrong about GPUs

#69

I shelled out for a 4090 when they came out thinking it would be the key factor for running local llms. It turns out that anything worth running takes way more than 24GB VRAM. I would have been better off with 2+ 3090s and a custom power supply. It’s a pity because I thought it would be a great solution for coding and a home assistant, but performance and quality isn’t there yet for small models (afaik). Perhaps DIGI…

The best bang for the buck on VRAM is a maxed out Mac Studio.

Absolutely! I have been playing with Ollama on a Macbook Pro 192 GiB RAM and it is able to run most models whereas my 3090 runs our of RAM.

Re: We were wrong about GPUs

#70

I shelled out for a 4090 when they came out thinking it would be the key factor for running local llms. It turns out that anything worth running takes way more than 24GB VRAM. I would have been better off with 2+ 3090s and a custom power supply. It’s a pity because I thought it would be a great solution for coding and a home assistant, but performance and quality isn’t there yet for small models (afaik). Perhaps DIGI…

My thoughts, expenses and regrets exactly.
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