I don't want to donate the cash but instead set up a handful of GPUs(Somehow?) and let people pay at cost to use them.
The servers that most people would like to run (8xA100, 8xH100) are over 200k, and even if you had the money they're probably very hard to get right now.
Just a pet peeve when ppl under exaggerate how many gpus/flops a dollar can buy (if you're slighly smart with your money).
Plus you'll need to set aside some money for the power bill lol
You won't be able to limit it to a particular set of clients who want to use it, but you're basically supporting the "GPU Poor" by doing this, as I think it's mostly smaller companies, individuals and researchers using vast.ai, rather than huge companies.
My grant covered the purchase of a Scalar server from Lambda Labs, which allowed me to configure a system with 8 previous-gen A6000 GPUs, partly also thanks to NVIDIA who has recently given me 3 of those cards, and Lambda Labs who offered to provide everything at cost.
a16z didn't ask for any equity or any kind of quid pro quo, other than to let folks know that they provided this grant. They couldn't have been more helpful through the process - I didn't have to fill out any forms (other than sign a single one page agreement), the contract was clear and totally fair (even explicitly saying that a16z wasn't going to receive any kind of rights to anything), and they wired me the money for buying the server promptly.
I'm sure you get this a lot, but thank you for teaching me ML - I am a hardware engineer/manufacturing person who learned to code in the early 2010s and it's been immensely helpful in my career. Learning ML feels like V2 of that - picking up a new skill that is going to end up being useful in so many places. You made that journey much easier and more accessible and I very much appreciate it.
(No need to respond at all - just wanted to pass along the gratitude!)
Just in case anyone hasn't surveyed the landscape lately, the distinction being made here is between "RTX A6000" (Ampere architecture; GeForce 30-series equivalent) and "RTX 6000 Ada Generation" (Ada architecture; GeForce 40-series equivalent) products. Nvidia is apparently convinced that it can get away with being almost as terrible at naming technology generations as the USB Implementers Forum.
Thanks for sharing, that is generous, and a pretty solid sign of being honest businessmen.
Best wishes in your work, jph00!
"There is one final, and real, AI risk that is probably the scariest at all:
AI isn’t just being developed in the relatively free societies of the West, it is also being developed by the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China.
China has a vastly different vision for AI than we do – they view it as a mechanism for authoritarian population control, full stop. They are not even being secretive about this, they are very clear about it, and they are already pursuing their agenda. And they do not intend to limit their AI strategy to China – they intend to proliferate it all across the world, everywhere they are powering 5G networks, everywhere they are loaning Belt And Road money, everywhere they are providing friendly consumer apps like Tiktok that serve as front ends to their centralized command and control AI.
The single greatest risk of AI is that China wins global AI dominance and we – the United States and the West – do not.
I propose a simple strategy for what to do about this – in fact, the same strategy President Ronald Reagan used to win the first Cold War with the Soviet Union.
'We win, they lose.'
Rather than allowing ungrounded panics around killer AI, “harmful” AI, job-destroying AI, and inequality-generating AI to put us on our back feet, we in the United States and the West should lean into AI as hard as we possibly can.
We should seek to win the race to global AI technological superiority and ensure that China does not."
I don't think one needs to think too hard about the grave consequences a mission of "We win, they lose" may have for human survival.
Please note, this program was designed to support individuals, teams, and hackers who are not pursuing commercial companies. Nevertheless, these projects push the state of the art in open source AI and help provide us with a more robust and comprehensive understanding of the technology as it is developed.
We are really proud to be contributing in this small fashion and grateful to the first cohort and all others contributing in this space!
If an individual is looking to contribute to the field with different training data ideas - would they need to first establish themselves and get your attention, or would there be a way to submit a proposal?
For myself compute is rather expensive, I could likely afford a few test runs for proofs of concept but beyond that it would be difficult. I've got a single 4090 so I can't run llama70b faster then 1it/s.
Are you interested in non-LLMs as well? Stable diffusion for example?
Even knowing this is partly motivated by branding/marketing, it's great to see a16z getting more aligned with solving real pain points (vs crypto and churning out shallow media in recent years). Hope they can keep it up and hopefully more "thought leaders"/VCs follow suit. Best of luck.
Certainly there are plenty of grifters in AI too (as with any gold rush) and many AI efforts will fizzle out. But it seems there is more real value being created here than in crypto, which is the main thing I'm excited about and hope to see more of
Plus A16Z has some questionable motives in general based on previous comments by them...
1) brand-washing for people who don’t do the math
2) avoiding angering our LPs and/or violating our fund theses and
3) getting in on the ground floor of things that might follow OpenAI through the non-profit-to-VC-darling door
Thanks for reading our press release, feel free to try to apply using your personal network (somehow) because we don’t care as we’ve already landed our positions.”
what math should i be doing here?
The bigger math is significance_of_contribution = $size_ai_grant_program/$size_ai_vc_program (or maybe $size_ai_grant_program - $size_ai_vc_program)
[ 0 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-72428-3_... ]
"We’ll support a small group of open source developers through grant funding (not an investment or SAFE note), giving them the opportunity to continue their work without the pressure to generate financial returns."
Some of the recipients of financial support have described the nature of the agreement as well.
> a16z didn't ask for any equity or any kind of quid pro quo, other than to let folks know that they provided this grant.
Less than 10k H100s makes you GPU poor. The author is presumably using it as a proxy for "possible to achieve AGI".
I don't agree with the side that says AI is about to destroy everything, it seems very hyperbolic... but neither do I agree with this sentiment that it's going to save the world.
That said, software of all kinds (including machine learning) does make the world more interesting and exciting, so happy to see more investment.
I negotiated with my day job to work 2AM to 10AM so that I can work on this passion project in the afternoons, some grant funding would really help me focus on this more. There's quite a bit of interesting stuff not on the website in catalyst discovery and molecular dynamics. Contact me if you'd like to chat / demo.
In my ideal world I would work on this full time and totally open source it.
Curious why there are no image ai projects receiving grants here?
Is this approach covered in the grants?
Yes, it is a company that often applies and receives grants. For example, we are working on adding AI to security tools such as https://github.com/CoinFabrik/scout
Having once done a grant application process - I think their approach is smart.
If they opened grant applications, they'd get thousands of (sadly mostly very low quality) applications. It's extremely hard to vet.
It's a much safer bet to wait until projects are already popular in the community, already being relied on by people, and where those devs would love to spend more time on their open source projects but they're limited by money.
Yes, the downside of this is that some people could make things happen if they were given money first. But, if I was them, I'd still prefer to do what they're doing and pick projects that are already successful and give grants to those.
(This isn't a comment about your project specifically, for all I know your project might be a popular open source LLM project that lots of people already rely on, in which case they probably already know about your project and will probably reach out to you for the second round, is my guess)
That being said, these are some great grants for local LLM builders, local computation for such powerful tools is needed, and will continue to be needed, as industry incumbents like OpenAI continue to not release their models.
And thank you so much for the input - we are meeting the folks at ollama!!
This is a good initiative, and an excellent initial batch. A great use of management fees!
I'm struggling to think of additional ones because I feel like this covers everyone I would've suggested (particularly TheBloke, vLLM and oobabooga).
Edit, some ideas for future grant recipients would be:
* MLC LLM
* ExLlama
* An open source fork of text-generation-inference
* AutoGPTQ
Surely there are also some interesting econometrics on the "GPU poverty line" - someone has literature to share?
Makes me very happy that this is being undertaken.
LLMs will be a very valuable tool. Having censorship built into these tools makes me very nervous. Imagine if Word refused to allow you to type any “bad word” in the name of safety and ethics.
Always seems to me our economy is being less based on money and more on energy and productivity, basically being rounded down to physics as a healthy market economy should.
Thank you for understanding the fundamental flaws of the World and human consciousness, and thank you for spending multiple lifetimes as Buddhist monks (not to mention lamas) to understand the intricacies of the human mind from a scientific perspective. This is exactly what we need right now and this initiative looks to be the answer to all of our problems.
