Of course? On average, companies that are still standing after ~15 to 20 years are going to be a lot larger than the companies who started more recently.
2,350 karma · joined September 27, 2016
If someone gets something to work with 1k h100s that should have taken 100k h100s, that means the group with the 100k is about to have a much, much better model.
We're building a new, regulated, commodity market for large scale GPU clusters. More like the Kalshi, less like craigslist. To accomplish this, we make a VM orchestrator called "Fog" that understands InfiniBand, GPUs, and heterogeneous hardware setups.
We make money by taking a flat fee of a few cents per GPU hour upon delivery. Up until recently, we've been "running a market" via a spreadsheet, by selling bursts on very large clusters (think 6 to 8 figures deal sizes).
SFC started because Alex (https://alexgajewski.org/) & I went to go train an audio model and none of the vendors at the time would sell us a month-long contract. So we bought a year-long one, and tried to sublease it at cost (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36933603), so that way we could buy just one month.
The goal of the company is the same: we want to make it possible to buy a big, giant training cluster for a short time period. We think a liquid market will let you spend $40m for a month instead of $300m for a year. If we can't make that happen, then only the big labs will get to make AI.
Most of our code is in rust, some typescript. We're about ~20 people. We raised $12m a bit ago. There are 7 ex-founders on the team.
We'd love to work with you! I'll bet you're cool.
Open roles are here: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sfcompute
You can also email me at contact@sfcompute.com.
Yup, shall do!
> Also, I'm really impressed at how great your replies about your product are! You're a gem.
Thank you! :D
We don't have a limited number of slots!
We just go down a lot. It's VERY beta at the moment; we literally take the whole thing down about once a week. So if we know of some major problem, or we're down, we just don't let people on (since they'll have a bad experience).
You're right though that the prices are probably lower because of this. That's why we have a thing on our website that says "*Prices are from the sfcompute private beta and don’t represent normal market conditions."
If you'd like on anyway, I can let you on, just email me at evan at sfcompute, but it may literally break!
Regardless of whether or not the implicit claim here is true (the claim being "all this spend won't produce an ROI"), the explicit claim here is nonsensical.
Of course the $1tn in capex has nothing to show for it! The spend has not happened yet! Of the spend that _has_ happened, most of the chips are not physically in data centers yet. Of the chips that _are_ in data centers, most of the models are not yet trained!
And of the models that _have_ been trained, many have clearly had a significant ROI. GPT-4 cost $100m, and OpenAI's revenue is now reported to be $3.4 billion a year.
Saying there's "little to show for it" is an absurd claim; the products are _printing_ cash! We beat the turing test! You can drive around in a self-driving car!
It's perfectly reasonable to say "where does the ROI come from when you spend $1tn on capex", but it's hard to argue against the success of the spend of the last generation of models.
This is a bit like trying to regulate horseshoes while everyone else is talking about speed limits & seat belts. Both parties say the word "carriage" and "passenger", but they have completely different ideas in their heads about what is about to happen.
Not trying to repost, just is a poorly explained launch.
I would ignore everyone who's repeating the same sort of standard startup advice or saying "blah blah doesn't xyz already do this". A lot of startup advice is bad / actively harmful, your thing is pretty good, and you should just do it if it's fun.
Because you're on HN, you're about to get a good bump. In a few days, that bump will go down, and you might start to feel sad! Ignore this sadness and keep pushing through. The time from when people first hear about a product and when they actually start using it can be like a few weeks to a month. If, in a few days, all the numbers are going down, know that this is how even successful products look after a product launch. (See the trough of sorrow) Keep going!
Keep shamefully posting it in places, consider a hacker news launch, or even putting up posters in high-foot-traffic areas (if you live in or close to a walkable area). I know social-media bad, but it's a pretty good place to reach out to folks on. My guess is making a little tiktok thing is not a bad idea.
If you've got cash to blow, consider ads. Lots of people will tell you ads are bad, because they "don't scale" or some other over-optimized thing. But if you just want people to see your thing, ads are a reasonable way to drive a little traffic and get a beginning user-base to experiment with.
Have fun! The design and explanation of the site is great!
Neither Alex or I are currently VCs, and this has no affiliation with any venture fund.
We want to be a customer of the sf compute group too!
This is the nicest thing anyone has said to us about this. We're gonna frame this and hang it out on our wall.
> So whenever someone comes knocking, begging for a tiny slice of your H100s for their harebrained idea, I hope you’ll humor them.
Absolutely! :D
Right now, it's pretty easy to get a few A/H100s (Lambda is great for this), but very hard to get more than 24 at a reasonable price ($~2 an hour). One often needs to put up a 6+ month commitment, even when they may only want to run their H100s for an 8 hour training run.
It's the right business decision for GPU brokers to do long term reservations and so on, and we might do so too if we were in their shoes. But we're not in their shoes and have a very different goal: arm the rebels! Let someone who isn't BigCorp train a model!
You can't legitimately say you care about pedestrian and bike safety and then turn around and suddenly try and block AVs because the vibes are wrong.
You should expect rent to fall though, multiple studies (https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/224569/1/vfs-2020-pi... | https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/7fc2bf_ee1737c3c9d4468881bf14...) have shown that increasing rental units lowers rents.
The math of this: a lot with 1 unit, worth $1m today, becomes a lot worth $3m and 10 units on it. So the cost per unit is $300k; unit price goes down, but value for the original land owner goes up.
Right now law enforcement already has a "killswitch": a traffic stop. If you don't stop at the traffic stop, the "killswitch" is a chase & spikes on the road.
A "killswitch" in which someone can just have the car pull-over seems like objectively safer.
It's as if the aliens warped their multi-dimensional space fleet through a worm-hole in the sky and the best thing you could think to ask them after they infected your brain with the translation virus is whether they voted for trump.
AI Grant is investing $250k on an uncapped, no-discount, MFN SAFE, as well as providing more than $300k in cloud credits.
AI Grant used to do small grants in lots of AI research projects. Now, we think there's plenty of research, and what's needed is products: so we're doing bigger investments in founders building products. Name's the same, but now we can deploy larger checks, and focus on what we think will help the most in 2022. Frankly we used the name "AI Grant" because we already had it!
If you're working on something cool, please apply! And if you have a special situation, or need help, reach out to support@aigrant.org