Thread

1. tristanj · 1789872737 · focus · HN ↗

   If you've already paid for and reserved a whole cluster of GPUs, any idle capacity is capacity you've already paid for. Using it is effectively free. So might as well use it to solve fun math puzzles.

   Though, it would make more financial sense to mine crypto.

   1. ehe78qhe · 1789874037 · focus · HN ↗

      Only if you pay a flat rate for electricity and cooling.

      1. tristanj · 1789874747 · focus · HN ↗

         But Anthropic isn't paying for the electricity and cooling. They don't run their own data centers, they rent compute from providers who cover those costs.

         That's entirely why they can blow compute on the fun projects like this. If they had to pay extra for the electricity, they wouldn't do it.

         1. Barbing · 1789875765 · focus · HN ↗

            Is the electricity cost far greater than the marketing value?

            1. rightnutwingjob · 1789877097 · focus · HN ↗

               The first is a physical quantity that can be written down.

               The second is approximately no better than astrology.

               1. ehe78qhe · 1789877746 · focus · HN ↗

                  The second point is, sadly, true of quite a lot of aspects of software, including "design" and "quality"

                  1. nullsanity · 1789882579 · focus · HN ↗

                     [dead]

            2. adastra22 · 1789882364 · focus · HN ↗

               The marginal electricity cost is zero.

               1. lazide · 1789887710 · focus · HN ↗

                  Or specifically, electricity was already paid for with the pre-paid capacity.

                  Not using it would not save them any money, they already paid for it.

                  1. Barbing · 1789935516 · focus · HN ↗

                     I was thinking if they owned their own data centers, how expensive might this project have been.
         2. londons_explore · 1789890625 · focus · HN ↗

            But training LLM's is also a task one can do whenever you have a spare GPU-minutes.

            I wonder why they don't have some kind of scheduler which makes sure there are never any idle minutes. One would imagine they at least would have autoscaling on their production serving workload and use the freed compute capacity for model training for example.

            1. esseph · 1789892447 · focus · HN ↗

               I doubt they're inferencing on their training hardware

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