Re:Ask HN: Can you crowdfund the compute for GPT?
by drakenot on Thursday January 12, 2023 @02:00PM
(#34358680)
What if you remove the financial incentive?
I'd contribute my GPU time to a Folding@Home style project if it meant that we had powerful, open LLMs that were free to use. I'm positive many others would as well.
As far as worrying about scammers, could you send the same compute task and training data to multiple clients and validate the results against each other? If they differed, you could throw the results and try again, or send it to a 3rd to break the tie.
Re:Ask HN: Can you crowdfund the compute for GPT?
by brap on Thursday January 12, 2023 @02:32PM
(#34359095)
You could remove the financial incentive, but then you’re really limiting the pool of resources (you have to rely on people’s kindness, which only works, partially, in noble cases like finding a cure for cancer or searching for extraterrestrial life).
By sending the work to 3 people each time, you’re effectively cutting your (already limited) resource pool by 66%.
* Servers in a datacenter are much more reliable than a network of PCs (power goes off, someone decides to play Crysis, etc)
* People will find ways to scam you (pretend like they’re doing the calculation while not actually doing it)
* Economies of scale means a datacenter will probably be cheaper than what you’d have to pay the PC owners (power consumption, wear, etc)
I’ve pitched this idea more than a decade ago and quickly realized it doesn’t work in practice.