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by qchris 2132 days ago
This is an area that I find unbelievably frustrating. A lack of computing resources in the current day is kind of insane. You can buy an 8GB GPU for <$1000. Even with the rest of the costs, the cost of hardware like this is a drop in the bucket when your main office is housed in Mountain View! Especially on a project that ends up being public-facing, these are missed opportunities where a little can go a long way.
2 comments

I take your point but according to the release details on the repo it was not 8Gb on one card but a server with 8 cards, each a Quadro RTX 6000 with 24Gb, and they're around £4k each currently, so the cost of the GPUs alone is £32k

https://github.com/mozilla/STT/releases/tag/v0.8.2

Ah, I see-- not an 8GB, 1-GPU server, but an 8-GPU server. That does make a bit of a difference, changing the cost from a new workstation to functionally a piece of capital equipment. Still, I'm not sure that my point about equipment costs falls short--even at (call it) $40K, you're probably talking less than 3 months of the company's all-in cost for the developer themself, amortized over multiple years.
We need a SETI@home approach to open source AI models.

Only then we can break our dependency on Google and Facebook - and Mozilla for that matter.