> What am I missing? There are a couple of things. First off, academic funding for things like AI-capable clusters is a whole thing, let alone the support sta

> What am I missing? There are a couple of things. First off, academic funding for things like AI-capable clusters is a whole thing, let alone the support staff for them. This is difficult for a host of reasons, some good and some bad. Secondly, this isn't about hosting files really, it's about providing a suitable environment to run the model in. You can expect a AI research lab to have figured out how to do training in a reasonable way, but what they have here is more of an inference in production problem. That's really outside the expected expertise of a research lab. In the old days you just wouldn't be able to access this simply. Today there are turn-key(ish) solutions with built in scaling; they used one - it scaled and now they are wincing at the bill. This isn't crazy, as the google->google egress fees are not obvious.