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I thought I read somewhere that basically Microsoft was giving them all the infrastructure they need for free. Sorry no evidence. It would not be possible to c
by andrewstuart 4y ago
I thought I read somewhere that basically Microsoft was giving them all the infrastructure they need for free. Sorry no evidence.
It would not be possible to cloud host an operation this reliant on GPU power …. the costs would be way too high compared to self hosting. GPUs in the cloud are very expensive, have availability issues, and tend to be behind the state of the art consumer GPUs.
- steve_adams_86 4y agoThis press release[^1] indicated MS does intend to provide infrastructure, including investing in providing more supercomputer infra specifically for openai: > Microsoft will increase our investments in the development and deployment of specialized supercomputing systems to accelerate OpenAI’s groundbreaking independent AI research. It isn’t clear what “provide” means exactly (is it free? At cost?) but I suspect there are guarantees of availability as well as discounts involved to ease operating costs. [1] https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/23/microsoftandopenaiextendpartnership/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/23/microsoftandopen...
- andrewstuart 4y agoMicrosoft Azure has had severe GPU shortages for a long while now. I wonder if there’s a connection.
- geysersam 4y agoIt's hard to see why there would be a real cost difference, besides the cost of paying the middle man. If the middle man owns you, and is implicitly paying for your compute investments either way, they might be inclined to give you a discount. If anything, it's a great opportunity for Azure to scale their ML infrastructure and test it on large problems. Also, "Used by OpenAI" could be useful for marketing. So there are lots of incentives here for MS to let OAI use their services at reduced cost.