4 ms·

I love the idea of community assets. could it be the start of a GPU co-op?

samstave 3y ago
Serious Q, as I dont know Twitters internal infra at all... but with a shrinking in revenue from ads, or maybe less engagement by users, and the influx of Threads - maybe twitter can use from slices of its infra (even if its rack space, VMs, Containers, connectivity, who knows what, to support startups such as this? Basically twitter devolves into the Colos of the late 90s :-) - For those who didnt notice, it was tongue in cheek.
- version_five 3y ago
  I've generally tried to give Twitter the benefit of the doubt but I would never trust them as an infrastructure provider in their current incarnation. Reliability and consistency have been so far from their focus.
- aionaiodfgnio 3y ago
  Would you really trust a company that doesn't pay its rent to run your infrastructure?
- mike_d 3y ago
  Generally when you just stop paying your bills the datacenter holds your hardware and eventually auctions it off to cover some of your debt. I seriously doubt Twitter has any access to the two of three datacenters Elon decided to not pay for.
fragmede 3y ago
For consumer-grade cards, that's already here. Make money off your GPU with vast.AI https://cloud.vast.ai/host/setup https://cloud.vast.ai/host/setup
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago
  My computer is sitting mostly idle at home, thanks for this.
- mdaniel 3y ago
  > Requirements > Ubuntu 18.04 or newer (required) > Dedicated machines only - the machine shouldn't be doing other stuff while rented well that's certainly not what I expected. ctrl-f "virtual" gives nothing, so it seems they really mean "take over your machine" > Note: you may need to install python2.7 to run the install script. what kind of nonsense is this? Did they write the script in 2001 and just abandon it?
  - orf 3y ago
    Seems like it: https://s3.amazonaws.com/vast.ai/install https://s3.amazonaws.com/vast.ai/install
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > what kind of nonsense is this? Did they write the script in 2001 and just abandon it? Anything AI/ML is a hot mess of cobbled-together bits and pieces of Python barely holding together. I recently read somewhere that there should be a new specialization of "ML DevOps Engineer"... and hell I'm supporting that.
    - p1esk 3y ago
      there should be a new specialization of "ML DevOps Engineer" Do you mean MLOps? Nothing new about it. We have two full-time MLOps engineers at our startup.
    - ethbr0 3y ago
      Python is awesome because they built what people wanted. Python is terrible because they built what people wanted.
  - williamstein 3y ago
    I just skimmed their FAQ at https://vast.ai/faq https://vast.ai/faq, and it seems like it could use an update. E.g., it says "Initially we are supporting Ubuntu Linux, more specifically Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.". That version of Ubuntu has been end-of-life'd for several years, and when I just tried vast.ai out, it seemed to be using Ubuntu 20.04. There were also a couple of words with letters missing (probably trivial typos) that could be found with a spell checker. The questions in their FAQ are really interesting though, in terms of highlighting what users care about (e.g., there's a lot devoted to "how do I use vast.ai + google colab together"?). I also wonder when vast.ai started? Sometimes you can get insight from a company blog page, but the vast.ai blog seems to start in Feb 2023: https://vast.ai/blog https://vast.ai/blog . There's a bunch of "personal experiences" with vast.ai from 3 years ago in this discussion though: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/hv49pd/d_consumer_gpu_cloud_rental_vastai/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/hv49pd/d_c... A comment in that discussion mentions yet another competitor in this space that I've never heard of: https://www.qblocks.cloud/ https://www.qblocks.cloud/ -- I just tried Q blocks out and the new user experience wasn't as good for me as with vast.ai: you have to put in $10 money to try it, instead of getting to try it initially for free; there is a manual approval process before you can try data center class GPUs; you only see that your instance is in Norway (say) after you try to start it, not before; it seems like there's no ssh access, and they only provide Jupyter to connect; neither pytorch nor tensorflow seemed to be installed. They could probably update their pages too, e.g., https://www.qblocks.cloud/vision https://www.qblocks.cloud/vision is all about crypto mining and smartphones, which feels a bit dated... :-)

Serious Q, as I dont know Twitters internal infra at all... but with a shrinking in revenue from ads, or maybe less engagement by users, and the influx of Threads - maybe twitter can use from slices of its infra (even if its rack space, VMs, Containers, connectivity, who knows what, to support startups such as this? Basically twitter devolves into the Colos of the late 90s :-) - For those who didnt notice, it was tongue in cheek.

version_five 3y ago
I've generally tried to give Twitter the benefit of the doubt but I would never trust them as an infrastructure provider in their current incarnation. Reliability and consistency have been so far from their focus.
aionaiodfgnio 3y ago
Would you really trust a company that doesn't pay its rent to run your infrastructure?
mike_d 3y ago
Generally when you just stop paying your bills the datacenter holds your hardware and eventually auctions it off to cover some of your debt. I seriously doubt Twitter has any access to the two of three datacenters Elon decided to not pay for.

fragmede 3y ago

For consumer-grade cards, that's already here. Make money off your GPU with vast.AI https://cloud.vast.ai/host/setup https://cloud.vast.ai/host/setup

PartiallyTyped 3y ago
My computer is sitting mostly idle at home, thanks for this.
mdaniel 3y ago
> Requirements > Ubuntu 18.04 or newer (required) > Dedicated machines only - the machine shouldn't be doing other stuff while rented well that's certainly not what I expected. ctrl-f "virtual" gives nothing, so it seems they really mean "take over your machine" > Note: you may need to install python2.7 to run the install script. what kind of nonsense is this? Did they write the script in 2001 and just abandon it?
- orf 3y ago
  Seems like it: https://s3.amazonaws.com/vast.ai/install https://s3.amazonaws.com/vast.ai/install
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > what kind of nonsense is this? Did they write the script in 2001 and just abandon it? Anything AI/ML is a hot mess of cobbled-together bits and pieces of Python barely holding together. I recently read somewhere that there should be a new specialization of "ML DevOps Engineer"... and hell I'm supporting that.
  - p1esk 3y ago
    there should be a new specialization of "ML DevOps Engineer" Do you mean MLOps? Nothing new about it. We have two full-time MLOps engineers at our startup.
  - ethbr0 3y ago
    Python is awesome because they built what people wanted. Python is terrible because they built what people wanted.
- williamstein 3y ago
  I just skimmed their FAQ at https://vast.ai/faq https://vast.ai/faq, and it seems like it could use an update. E.g., it says "Initially we are supporting Ubuntu Linux, more specifically Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.". That version of Ubuntu has been end-of-life'd for several years, and when I just tried vast.ai out, it seemed to be using Ubuntu 20.04. There were also a couple of words with letters missing (probably trivial typos) that could be found with a spell checker. The questions in their FAQ are really interesting though, in terms of highlighting what users care about (e.g., there's a lot devoted to "how do I use vast.ai + google colab together"?). I also wonder when vast.ai started? Sometimes you can get insight from a company blog page, but the vast.ai blog seems to start in Feb 2023: https://vast.ai/blog https://vast.ai/blog . There's a bunch of "personal experiences" with vast.ai from 3 years ago in this discussion though: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/hv49pd/d_consumer_gpu_cloud_rental_vastai/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/hv49pd/d_c... A comment in that discussion mentions yet another competitor in this space that I've never heard of: https://www.qblocks.cloud/ https://www.qblocks.cloud/ -- I just tried Q blocks out and the new user experience wasn't as good for me as with vast.ai: you have to put in $10 money to try it, instead of getting to try it initially for free; there is a manual approval process before you can try data center class GPUs; you only see that your instance is in Norway (say) after you try to start it, not before; it seems like there's no ssh access, and they only provide Jupyter to connect; neither pytorch nor tensorflow seemed to be installed. They could probably update their pages too, e.g., https://www.qblocks.cloud/vision https://www.qblocks.cloud/vision is all about crypto mining and smartphones, which feels a bit dated... :-)