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For HN: There is and active community on Reddit exploring this tech using free Google Colab notebooks. A few of us pay Google $10/month for practically unlimi

For HN: There is and active community on Reddit exploring this tech using free Google Colab notebooks. A few of us pay Google $10/month for practically unlimited usage. https://www.reddit.com/user/corysama/m/gan_art/ https://www.reddit.com/user/corysama/m/gan_art/ For OP: The notebooks have very awkward UX. So, putting a pretty front-end on it is a value-add. But, it won't last. Your base cost is 5 minutes of GPU time. You will very soon be competing with free downloadable programs and much cheaper alternatives. And, I know from a ton of experiments that getting good results out of these systems takes a lot of practice and attempts. Charging $1 per dice roll where most of the time you roll crap will make people angry fast. What I'd recommend is building a machine with as many 32GB K80 GPUs as possible. They are awkward to build around and quite slow, but cheap if you can find them and have a surprisingly large amount of RAM. Let people use that machine for free to generate low-rez images. Limit 1 GPU per person at a time. And, figure out how to use a low-rez generated image to seed a 1080p version in the GAN using a CPU run with 64GB of RAM. Then take the output of that and AI-upscale it to 4K or something. Charge for the upscaled, denoised version of their favorite creations. Not for every time they roll the dice. Then hook up with a painting-on-demand service and sell drop-shipped prints of people creations.

axg11 5y ago
This is an interesting idea, essentially a platform to allow people to produce interesting/creative images and distribute from there. I agree with you that this is not a giant leap or value-add from what is out there. I'm hoping to iterate from where it is right now. I created this over the last few days as a hobby project to learn a few technologies.
spython 5y ago
The K80 seems indeed quite affordable. But would multi-GPU setup work well for these cases? Is the RAM shared?
- corysama 5y ago
  Not shared. But, you want to run lots of times. So, 8 cheap GPUs can run 8 separate experiments in parallel.
GusRuss89 5y ago
I've been running an AI Art Generator for a few years called NightCafe Creator and we do most of what you suggested here. We run on a managed Kubernetes provider called Coreweave Cloud, that provides nodes with good GPUs for a good price. From experience I can tell you that fewer people will buy prints than you'd expect (that was my original business idea) BUT more people will pay just to create the art than you'd expect. I just launched VQGAN+CLIP on NightCafe Creator on Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28081130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28081130) and a commenter directed me here. I'm impressed that the OP here has managed to get this done in such a short time (since VQGAN+CLIP is still quite new). Since you left such thoughtful feedback here, I'd be keen to get your thoughts on my own version.
hwayne 5y ago
It's possible to make the notebook UX a little better using IPython widgets and the form mode. That's what I did for `https://is.gd/artmachine https://is.gd/artmachine`. You have to strip away a lot of the power to make the UX nicer, but it's worth it for the accessibility.

axg11 5y ago

This is an interesting idea, essentially a platform to allow people to produce interesting/creative images and distribute from there. I agree with you that this is not a giant leap or value-add from what is out there. I'm hoping to iterate from where it is right now. I created this over the last few days as a hobby project to learn a few technologies.

spython 5y ago

The K80 seems indeed quite affordable. But would multi-GPU setup work well for these cases? Is the RAM shared?

corysama 5y ago
Not shared. But, you want to run lots of times. So, 8 cheap GPUs can run 8 separate experiments in parallel.

GusRuss89 5y ago

I've been running an AI Art Generator for a few years called NightCafe Creator and we do most of what you suggested here. We run on a managed Kubernetes provider called Coreweave Cloud, that provides nodes with good GPUs for a good price. From experience I can tell you that fewer people will buy prints than you'd expect (that was my original business idea) BUT more people will pay just to create the art than you'd expect. I just launched VQGAN+CLIP on NightCafe Creator on Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28081130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28081130) and a commenter directed me here. I'm impressed that the OP here has managed to get this done in such a short time (since VQGAN+CLIP is still quite new). Since you left such thoughtful feedback here, I'd be keen to get your thoughts on my own version.

hwayne 5y ago

It's possible to make the notebook UX a little better using IPython widgets and the form mode. That's what I did for `https://is.gd/artmachine https://is.gd/artmachine`. You have to strip away a lot of the power to make the UX nicer, but it's worth it for the accessibility.