[tinco]

Our main compute doesn't go towards machine learning, but we do rely heavily on GPU power. I recently had to come up with the figures for us to invest in an expansion of our compute power, and it turned out that buying the machines ourselves would be cheaper than renting them from Google in 3-4 months.

We don't run on those fancy V100 cards though, just regular old gaming cards suffice, and I suppose if we bought the "industrial" nvidia versions it would a take a bit longer to recoup, but still definitely within the year.

Anyway what I'm saying is that it's probably possible to to this a lot cheaper than 36M, though maybe not in such a short time. Our startup is extremely cash intensive, and I bet machine learning companies are as well (I suppose machine learning experts aren't cheap ;)), so if we can put in some work and safe a big portion off our hardware costs that really goes the distance.

[gridlockd]

How Google started out: Run servers from a shack, using commodity PC hardware

How modern startups start out: Spend $50,000/month to run hundreds of microservices on a managed Kubernetes cluster

[est31]

Which of the modern startup founders have gotten into the Stanford PhD program as teenagers? Those people are extremely rare and there is far too much VC floating around to focus only on such talent. Most founders, while still outstanding, are not from that class of person. Also, due to the larger sums of money being thrown around, people can just do those things now and spend their time growing their business instead of optimizing it. In the VC funded environment, optimizing businesses lose out to competitors which grow the fastest.

[qayxc]

How else do you attract venture capitalists and convince them to throw millions at you? You need all the buzzwords and the latest tech ;)

I remember my last chat with one of such guys. They insisted that the company wasn't up-to-date because we didn't run our app inside containers and didn't develop our own AI/ML systems...

[vegesm]

probably the memory requirements mean that you do need (multiple) V100s though