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.
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.
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.
tristanj · · focus · HN ↗
Though, it would make more financial sense to mine crypto.
ehe78qhe · · focus · HN ↗
tristanj · · focus · HN ↗
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.
londons_explore · · focus · HN ↗
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.
esseph · · focus · HN ↗