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Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation
- RatchetWerks 1y agoA VC fund selling “self-hosted” AI compute rigs was never on my bingo card. I’m glad they did. It’s weird and different.
- ProofHouse 1y agoBuilding a16z’s Personal AI Workstation with four NVIDIA RTX 6000 Pro Blackwell Max-Q GPUs
- bix6 1y agoOk but what are you doing with them? Much more interested in that.
- blibble 1y agojust about enough power to run Microsoft Defender and maybe Teams too
- multjoy 1y agoIt’s Teams or Defender, they haven’t built a supercomputer.
- tempusalaria 1y agoI imagine it runs civ 2 pretty well
- tetrisgm 1y agoDude imagine mounting a virtual drive on that GPU and loading the game straight from that. You won’t even notice the loading screens!
- evrimoztamur 1y agoAre they going to gift it to the POTUS for some favours or what now? Apple's gold bar type s...
- anaisbetts 1y agoIt's gaudy as fuck but the charitable explanation is that they're mimicing the nVidia DGX aesthetic rather than Trump, which would at least make sense
- Sherveen 1y agoUgly. Just like their new logo and their president.
- CamperBob2 1y agoPrice: "Call for pricing. Never mind, if you have to call and ask, you can't afford it."
- chis 1y agoA16Z is consistently the most embarrassing VC firm at any given point in time. I guess optimistically they might be doing “outrage marketing” but it feels more like one of those places where the CEO is just an idiot and tells his employees to jump on every trend. The funny part is that they still make money. It seems like once you’ve got the connections, being a VC is a very easy job these days.
- orionsbelt 1y agoVC is a marketing game. You want to be attractive to founders, so that the best founders/companies come to you and want to choose you.
- aprilthird2021 1y agoBut is gassing up founders something they want? Idk, maybe. But just remember these guys crypto play and it feels like they'll just yes man you off a cliff if you're a founder...
- doctoboggan 1y agoYes people like that even if they think it doesn't work on them. Just like people who say advertising doesn't work on them when it really does work on us all.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- refulgentis 1y agoIt's been such a mind-boggling decline in intellect, combined with really odd and intense conspiratorial behavior around crypto, that I went into a bit a few months ago. My weak, uncited, understanding from then they're poorly positioned, i.e in our set they're still the guys who write you a big check for software, but in the VC set they're a joke: i.e. they misunderstood carpet bombing investment as something that scales, and went all in on way too many crypto firm. Now, they have embarrassed themselves with a ton of assets that need to get marked down, it's clearly behind the other bigs, but there's no forcing function to do markdowns. So we get primal screams about politics and LLM-generated articles about how a $9K video card is the perfect blend between price and performance. There's other comments effusively praising them on their unique technical expertise. I maintain a llama.cpp client on every platform you can think of. Nothing in this article makes any sense. If you're training, you wouldn't do it on only 4 $9K GPUs that you own. If you're inferencing, you're not getting much more out of this than you would a ~$2K Framework desktop.
- aliljet 1y agoThis article is a great way to showcase A16Z standinging head and shoulders above other VCs with REAL technical expertise in the partnership. Love reading this kind of stuff, but the article really needs a price to put this in perspective. It would be the VC that would ignore price, lol, but roughing this out it looks like it costs 45k to build this thing. Seems, at first glance, that this is a cost efficient way to dodge buying a Kia Carnival and get a tier-1 GPU workstation..
- blibble 1y ago> This article is a great way to showcase A16Z standinging head and shoulders above other VCs with REAL technical expertise in the partnership. what? a 12 year old with a titanic budget could put this PC together
- aliljet 1y agoI don't want to be insulting here, but have you sat down with a partner at a VC before? You may be surprised to discover their skill is rarely deeply technical...
- blibble 1y agoyes, I worked for a VC funded micro startup for 5 years I was not impressed by any of the partners (but hey they were better than the PE partners I worked for immediately after)
- aprilthird2021 1y agoThere's almost 0 skill required to plug in components meant to be plugged in to each other...
- jsheard 1y agoThe technical expertise of... buying four of the fanciest Nvidia GPU and plugging them into an off-the-shelf motherboard in an off-the-shelf chassis? A serious attempt at this kind of build would use the server variant of the RTX6000 and custom air ducts to cool them efficiently, but they packed four blower coolers like sardines so it no doubt sounds like a screaming jet engine under load.
- henning 1y ago> access to raw compute is still one of the biggest bottlenecks > We are planning to test and make a limited number of these So this does approximately nothing to solve the original problem of supply and cost. Even if you sold it at a loss, that GPU is still going to be expensive. Just be honest and say you thought it would be cool and you're not Y Combinator so you gotta do whatever you can to make your firm seem like a special smart kids club.
- tennisflyi 1y agoAre they Trump? Oy vey
- transpute 1y ago> personal AI Workstation delivers complete control over your environment, latency reduction, custom configurations and setups, and the privacy of running all workloads locally. What's the recommended operating system with support for this hardware and local compute without cloud telemetry/identity?
- ekianjo 1y agolinux?
- perdomon 1y agoHow much heat does it generate and how loud is it at full tilt? Try keep comparing it to a modern under-desk computer, but I’m not sure you’d want to have that thing in the same room while you’re using it?
- vlabakje90 1y agoAccording to the specifications the max power draw is 1650W. All of that is converted into heat so it's like a small space heater.
- idontwantthis 1y agoIt’s more than a space heater. Any heater is usually 1500w.
- yencabulator 1y agoAnd that is to keep it safe. Continuously pulling 1650 W out of a US power socket is not safe. I've seen even 1500 W continuous heat up loose connections inside the socket to a level that charred plastic. Leaving this machine running a heavy compute load for hours without a 20A socket is a fire hazard: > Surprising efficiency: Despite its scale, the workstation pulls 1650W at peak, low enough to run on a standard 15-amp / 120V household circuit.
- deepsquirrelnet 1y agoIf you can’t already just buy a Lenovo or Dell workstation with this configuration, I’m sure you can just buy 4x GPUs and plug them into a base system that will support them. Who is buying hardware this expensive from a business that probably doesn’t really know how to do (or isn’t setup to do) proper manufacturing tests?
- teaearlgraycold 1y agoIf some rich guys want to role play as engineers - sure go ahead. But making this article should be a humiliation.
- jryle70 1y agoHN at its worse. Whining about anything and everything. Role playing as engineers? Don't you think there are many engineers working for AZ16? > But making this article should be a humiliation. Article? It's their f*king website. Did you say the same when someone post their complaint about LLM on their blog?
- donperignon 1y agoCringe.
- eagerpace 1y agoThis is the not-so-distant-future that a lot of people don’t see. We’re in the AI mainframe era and it’s coming to the pc era soon. I hope that’s what Apple is waiting on. Perhaps we will buy LLMs and install them locally one day too like a video game.
- danjl 1y agoIf you actually want a good multi-GPU system, just get an NVIDIA-designed system. There's no good reason to try to design and build one yourself when you will be relying almost entirely on NVIDIA cards and their multi-GPU communication.
- moomoo11 1y agoIf AI bubble pops can I mine crypto on it
- theyinwhy 1y agoHappy april 1st!
- 827a 1y agoIn less than a year when A16z is finished with the few, pointless experiments they want to run on this and it is relegated to a closet forgotten, some poor founder is going to see it appear as part of their term sheet. "Oh, yes, $75,000 of our $500,000 commit is compensated through this state-of-the-art AI Workstation"
- marcusb 1y agoA rough price out using new egg/microcenter pricing, substituting a few items where they didn't specify a specific item/brand. I didn't bother trying to figure out what case they used. Grand total: ~ $41,000 Motherboard https://www.newegg.com/gigabyte-mh53-g40-amd-ryzen-threadripper-pro-7000-wx-series-processors/p/N82E16813145513 https://www.newegg.com/gigabyte-mh53-g40-amd-ryzen-threadrip... $895 CPU https://www.microcenter.com/product/674313/amd-ryzen-threadripper-pro-7975wx-storm-peak-40ghz-32-core-str5-boxed-processor-heatsink-not-included https://www.microcenter.com/product/674313/amd-ryzen-threadr... - $3500 Cooler https://www.newegg.com/p/3C6-013W-002G6 https://www.newegg.com/p/3C6-013W-002G6 $585 RAM https://www.newegg.com/a-tech-256gb/p/1X5-006W-00702 https://www.newegg.com/a-tech-256gb/p/1X5-006W-00702 $1600 SSDs https://www.newegg.com/crucial-2tb-t700-nvme/p/N82E16820156330 https://www.newegg.com/crucial-2tb-t700-nvme/p/N82E168201563... $223 x 4 = $892 GPUs https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16888892012 https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16888892012 - $8295 x 4 = $33,180 Case https://www.newegg.com/fractal-design-atx-full-tower-north-steel-computer-cases-charcoal-black-fd-c-nor1x-02/p/N82E16811352216 https://www.newegg.com/fractal-design-atx-full-tower-north-s... $195 Power Supply https://www.newegg.com/thermaltake-toughpower-gf3-series-ps-tpd-1650fnfagu-4-1650-w/p/N82E16817153434 https://www.newegg.com/thermaltake-toughpower-gf3-series-ps-... - $314
- latchkey 1y agoAs soon as you drive it off the lot, it is worth half the value.
- marcusb 1y agoIt'll lose another half if you spray paint it gold like in the OP photos.
- randomtoast 1y agoSo we are talking 10k ebay price.
- karmakaze 1y agoThis could have been much more expensive. They built it from off-the-shelf parts anyone could get (except for the cost) and listed them which I appreciate. Microcenter/Newegg could put together a bundle as a joke and they'd likely get a few orders. Of course I don't personally have any use for this but it's good to have an idea what it takes to run the best openweight models in a secure/controlled environment. To get started a single 96GB GPU system is only $16,115. For perspective I spent about $10k (today dollars) for a Toshiba Portege 320CT laptop with as much memory and accessories as I could get in 1998.
- lostmsu 1y agoCan you guys make one more that I could stop by and pick up from your office (and pay for, if you care for that sort of thing)? I checked with Puget Systems, but they are only doing 3 cards max. My only question is: why not Zen 5? No suitable motherboards?
- jjwiseman 1y agoIt seems like this post has been removed from the front page of HN. I think it was in the #1 spot 15 minutes ago.
- sciencesama 1y agoFor this money a tenstoreent silent machine is much better
- throwaway-11-1 1y agoSuper cool specs but I can’t stop laughing at that goofy A16Z logo on the case. Zero taste
- mips_avatar 1y agoOther than the fact it's cool to run locally, what's the advantage of having one of these vs renting h100 clusters from runpod/lambda?