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Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

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Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#71

Post by jonnydubowsky »

Samin100 wrote: post #19
dpwm wrote: post #7

There's a lot of comments on that reddit thread about how awesome this would be as a service. But there's a big problem of trust with this for ML. How do I know you actually ran what I paid you for and not just generated random data that looks right in the shape I wanted it? You could farm it out to two people and if the results disagree, then payment is decided by a third. But then you've just doubled the (paid) wor…

It's pretty much letting people with GPUs become a sort of 'mini-cloud provider'. There's no job queue or fancy distributing computing setup. We just let you SSH into a container on someone's computer, and pay for the time used. I was doing a lot of fun deep learning projects on the side & would often Venmo my friend who was mining Ethereum to use his GPU to train my models. He made more and I paid less than AWS spot…

I love the way this idea evolved across threads, to stimulate a great discussion! As this idea attracts attention, the limits of scaling this become clear, as does the need for well balanced network incentives. This is one of those problems that actually does benefit from a blockchain token, and a few implementations are just emerging. I imagine success with this concept will include Homomorphic Encryption or Zero Knowledge Proofs, in order to prove unique processing took place. Value added services seem to be a natural fit as well. Check out Openmined ( https://github.com/OpenMined/Docs) Cardstack (particularly this recent post “The Tally Protocol: Scaling Ethereum With Untapped GPU Power” @christse https://medium.com/cardstack/the-tally-protocol-scaling-ethe... and Ocean Protocol, and as others mentioned, SONM, iExec, Golem, and all the BOINC tokens (pascal coin). I so look forward to this whole niche maturing.

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#74

Post by Samin100 »

doall wrote: post #72

Considering for hosting. One concern is that I have to expose my IP address to unknown users. I don't know if it's possible, but it will be great that if I can hide my location and purely lend my GPU with less security concerns.

You don't need to expose your IP address at all! The AI/ML researchers can only connect to one of our proxy servers instead of directly connecting to your machine. This means hosts do not have to mess with port forwarding or networking (even if your computer is behind a university firewall, you can still be a host!)

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#75

Post by milesokeefe »

jonhohle wrote: post #59
sangnoir wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's pretty much letting people with GPUs become a sort of 'mini-cloud provider'. There's no job queue or fancy distributing computing setup. We just let you SSH into a container on someone's computer, and pay for the time used. I had the same idea a few days ago - but in my head, the process would be wrapped up as a "cryptocurrency" where the AI researchers pay real money and the "proof of work" is useful/"real" w…

> the first is that how do you verify that the hardware owner is running the real job an not NOOP'ing and sending false results? Consensus. Have _n_ nodes perform the same work (if it’s deterministic), and only accept (and pay) if all the nodes match - or at least the nodes that were part of the majority I don’t think this would be considerably different from SETI or folding@home, which have been going on for around…

If you can pay for a single fully trusted node to do the calculation once, the cost of n nodes redundantly calculating the same result in order to establish trust must require those untrusted nodes to be cumulatively cheaper than the one trusted node, in order for there to be an economic incentive to do so, no?

My assumption is that you would have to be faithful in a low number of untrusted nodes in order for that to end up cheaper.

The cases of folding and SETI are particularly different because there are institutions which have in interest in funding these programs in part due to their goal being a public cause. The same clearly doesn’t apply to micro tasks if you will.

But I can imagine cases in which you can accept bad actors giving bunk results for some percentage of the calculations you run. As long as you’re rotating nodes often enough (provided that they’re from distinct actors) I’m imagine it could work out to be economically more feasible to spend the time to work around that bad data than it would be to directly hire fully trustable compute power.

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#76

Post by [deleted] »

Samin100 wrote: post #74
doall wrote: post #72

Considering for hosting. One concern is that I have to expose my IP address to unknown users. I don't know if it's possible, but it will be great that if I can hide my location and purely lend my GPU with less security concerns.

You don't need to expose your IP address at all! The AI/ML researchers can only connect to one of our proxy servers instead of directly connecting to your machine. This means hosts do not have to mess with port forwarding or networking (even if your computer is behind a university firewall, you can still be a host!)

[deleted]

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#77

Post by lovelearning »

proofofmoon wrote: post #4
inetknght wrote: post #2

GPUs are already too expensive for gamers and now you want to do this?!

AI research demand is a lot easier for AMD/Nvidia to project, which allows them to ramp up production and keep prices stable. Side note: AI research is more beneficial to society than running a few instances of Crysis 9 at 4K 120HZ.

...potentially more beneficial. Also potentially very harmful depending on what it gets used for.

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#78

Post by ISL »

We're coming into the warm seasons in the northern hemisphere, but if this effort survives into autumn, it'll be quite tempting for home-heating.

Stoked to see distributed-compute as a paying service making another try. One of these days, it is going to fly.

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#79

Post by doall »

Samin100 wrote: post #74
doall wrote: post #72

Considering for hosting. One concern is that I have to expose my IP address to unknown users. I don't know if it's possible, but it will be great that if I can hide my location and purely lend my GPU with less security concerns.

You don't need to expose your IP address at all! The AI/ML researchers can only connect to one of our proxy servers instead of directly connecting to your machine. This means hosts do not have to mess with port forwarding or networking (even if your computer is behind a university firewall, you can still be a host!)

Wow that's great! Another question. It is always possible that I have some downtime (unstable network connection, accidentally shutdown my pc, power outage, etc) and it may become unfair that users having significantly less downtime (better network, UPS, etc) having same earnings with users with much more downtime. Is there any plan to deal with such kind of concern?

By the way, Vectordash is the most interesting idea & service I have seen in a while :)

Re: Rent out GPUs to AI researchers and make ~2x more than mining cryptocurrencies

#80

Post by jakob223 »

jonhohle wrote: post #59
sangnoir wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's pretty much letting people with GPUs become a sort of 'mini-cloud provider'. There's no job queue or fancy distributing computing setup. We just let you SSH into a container on someone's computer, and pay for the time used. I had the same idea a few days ago - but in my head, the process would be wrapped up as a "cryptocurrency" where the AI researchers pay real money and the "proof of work" is useful/"real" w…

> the first is that how do you verify that the hardware owner is running the real job an not NOOP'ing and sending false results? Consensus. Have _n_ nodes perform the same work (if it’s deterministic), and only accept (and pay) if all the nodes match - or at least the nodes that were part of the majority I don’t think this would be considerably different from SETI or folding@home, which have been going on for around…

Consensus for every computation would be 2x as expensive, but you may be able to achieve something like it with randomly assigning 10% of the calculations to be double-checked, and double=checking more (all?) of a node's computations if it has an inconsistent result.
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