I found it fun to read this after reading this other post that made the rounds today about AI automating most programming work and making program optimization irrelevant: https://bartoszmilewski.com/2020/02/24/math-is-your-insuranc...
Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height
91–100 of 256 posts
Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height
#92Earlier 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…
Learned a new word today. Pyrrhic.
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Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height
#93The A16Z piece makes all these points quite clearly. This editorial is trying to put a finer point on a sharp knife.
Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height
#94"Huge compute bills" usually come from training, or to be more precise, hyperparameter search that's required before you find a model that works well. You could also fail to find such a model, but that's another discussion. So yeah, you could spend one or two FTE salaries' (or one deep learning PhD's) worth of cash on finding such models for your startup if you insist on helping Jeff Bezos to wipe his tears with cris…
> Also, if your startup is venture funded, AWS will give you $100K in credit
AFAIK that is limited to <$20k and it expires.
Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Hi, I'm from fly.io) It depends what you need in your datacenters! If you just want servers, and don't care about doing something like anycast, you can find a bunch of local dedicated server providers in a bunch of cities and go to town. But you can't get them all from one provider, really, not with any kind of reasonable budget. You _could_ buy colo from a place like Equinix in a bunch of cities, and then either us…
(thanks mrkurt) It is anycast that I'm going after. Requirement for unmetered bandwidth (or cheaper than AWS et al) is because of the kind of workloads (TURN relays, proxy, tunnels etc) we'd deal with gets expensive, otherwise. For another related workload, per-request pricing gets expensive, again, due to the nature of the workload (to the tune 100k requests per user per month). So far, for the former (TURN relays e…
Ah interesting! If you're cool talking more about what you're doing with me will you send me an email (kurt@fly.io)?
Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height
#96So, way back in the last millenium, I did my Master's thesis (way smaller deal than a Ph.D. thesis) on neural networks. Since then, I have looked in on it every few years. I think they're cool, I like using them, and writing multi-level backpropagation neural networks used to be one of the first things I'd do in a new language, just to get a feel for how it worked (until pytorch came along and I decided for the first…
Well the term Postgres or Python startup may not make sense, but a Pytorch or TensorFlow startup may not either. A database startup though, tells me the company is likely going to be in the database field, and most likely is going to try and sell me something I don't need. An AI startup, similarly, is going to either be utilizing existing techniques on industry problems to sell me something I don't need, or making some novel improvement to the training or inference to sell me something else I don't need.
So...yeah.
Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The next generation of Machine Learning is just emerging, and looks nothing like this. Funds are being raised, patents are being filed, and everything is in early stage development, so you probably haven't heard much yet ... Citations needed. Large claims: presumably you can name one example of this, and hopefully it's not a company you work at. I've seen projects on literally all the things you mention: materials s…
>Citations needed. Large claims: presumably you can name one example of this, and hopefully it's not a company you work at. Unfortunately this is all emerging just now and yes, I do work at such a company, but I'm old enough to not be naively excited by some hot fad. There's something profound just starting to happen but everyone is keeping the tech rather secret because it isn't developed/differentiated enough yet t…
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Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The next generation of Machine Learning is just emerging, and looks nothing like this. Funds are being raised, patents are being filed, and everything is in early stage development, so you probably haven't heard much yet ... Citations needed. Large claims: presumably you can name one example of this, and hopefully it's not a company you work at. I've seen projects on literally all the things you mention: materials s…
>Citations needed. Large claims: presumably you can name one example of this, and hopefully it's not a company you work at. Unfortunately this is all emerging just now and yes, I do work at such a company, but I'm old enough to not be naively excited by some hot fad. There's something profound just starting to happen but everyone is keeping the tech rather secret because it isn't developed/differentiated enough yet t…
I mean, the fact that you just wall of texted me with "trust me" doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. You could at least point me at an impressive paper or something!
I read all the NIPS stuff every other year; don't see anything game changing in there!
Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some kinds of inference are expensive, yes, not going to dispute that. But 99.95% of it is actually surprisingly inexpensive. Hell, a lot of useful workloads can be deployed on a cell phone nowadays, and that fraction will increase over time, further reducing inference costs or eliminating them outright (or rather moving them to the consumer). For the vast majority of people the main expense is creating the combinati…
The algorithms that run on cell phones tend to be specially optimized and quality-reduced neural networks. For example, https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.04861
Apple does a pretty good job at that, with no compromise in quality.
Re: Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it fun how the cost of the cloud is forcing people to consider what absolutely must run in the cloud (presumably for stability and compliance reasons) and what can be brought back on-prem. We don't train ML models, but we are in a similar boat regarding cloud compute costs. Building our solutions for our clients is a compute-heavy task which is getting expensive in the cloud. We are considering options such as…
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.
Tangentially, I once joined a startup where a week after I started the CEO demanded that I run their crawler software on my own personal hardware, on my personal internet connection, 24x7. I (politely) told him to go fuck himself.
I later learned that the CTO had to spend a couple hours talking him out of firing me. I probably should've just quit on the spot anyway.