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Comment by LoganDark | Hacker News Reader

Is $15,000 really an "at home" sort of price?

(If money is no object, why not grab an oxide.computer rack? Assuming you have three-phase power, of course...)

I don't think the $15k price tag is intended for regular consumers. I didn't listen to the Lex Fridman interview (my patience starts to wane after the first two hours), but I did listen to another of Hotz's interview on another podcast, and I believe he referred to this their "Tiny Box" as more of a dev box. It's for the engineers and tinkerers who want a capable machine for AI. So while expensive, it fills a niche for those who don't want to deal with linking multiple Nvidia GPUs together and deal with the power and cooling setup that come with that.

He's definitely thinking bigger than just dev boxes. Lately he's repeatedly mentioned building own chips to be somewhere in the future. How plausible that is is another matter

Right, that’s the long term plan. I’m speaking specifically about the $15k first release of the tiny box.

Right, especially when it's not clear if such a machine will be needed a year or two from now to run a model with the equivalent performance.

At this rate it may not be needed in a few months to run a model of equivalent performance.

At work I've been successfully running llama2 variants on Mac M2 systems with more than adequate throughput for small experiments and examples. Can also boot a 4x Nvidia T4 instance on AWS (g4dn.12xlarge) to larger models.

I feel you'd need to be doing inference on a 24/7 basis for at least a year to justify the price of this machine.

That's roughly the price of two original Macintosh computers adjusted for inflation.

Does oxide do GPU builds? I thought they're classic server racks (CPU)

> three-phase power,

Think for the tiny grad it's run off single, but for the US the GPUs are power limited given the 110V grid.

We (oxide) aren't doing a GPU focused product yet, that's right.

A new car, especially electric, costs significantly more than $15,000, yet people buy them and bring them home daily.

Transportation is a universal need, and the time savings over other forms are often worth the premium. Doubtful the same can be said for these.

> Is $15,000 really an "at home" sort of price?

For something that is... going to hallucinate? I don't get it?

I mean, people spend way more than that on random art paintings and sculptures right?

With this, it could always be repurposed if something new and shiny comes along

> With this, it could always be repurposed if something new and shiny comes along

I mean, the oxide.computer specs make me go "this would be the most killer gaming machine in all of existence" ... though it's a server rack meant to host an entire private cloud for an entire corporation, I still would love to glom together as much resources as can fit into a single VM for gaming purposes.

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