[benboughton1]

I love the enthusiasm, but is this another Google thing that is for researchers only? Yes fantastic technology etc, but say you develop something on the infrastructure then go to commercialise, what do you do?

I don't know much about the ML space, but is this a bit like Google Earth Engine, amazing tech, very generous resources free for researchers and development but cannot be ported elsewhere so to commercialise you then are limited to this very environment which is not cheap. I recently reached out to Google for pricing on GEE, 3 weeks later I got a response. 3 weeks.

[qayxc]

NVIDIA used CUDA to establish industry-wide vendor lock-in on GPU compute.

Google uses TPUs to try and establish an industry-wide vendor lock-in on deep learning.

Same old, same old.

[sillysaurusx]

Your view here is entirely reasonable. It was my view before I ever heard about TFRC. I was every bit as skeptical.

That view is wrong. From https://github.com/shawwn/website/blob/master/jaxtpu.md :

> So we're talking about a group of people who are the polar opposite of any Google support experience you may have had.

> Ever struggle with GCP support? They took two weeks to resolve my problem. During the whole process, I vividly remember feeling like, "They don't quite seem to understand what I'm saying... I'm not sure whether to be worried."

> Ever experience TFRC support? I've been a member for almost two years. I just counted how many times they failed to come through for me: zero times. And as far as I can remember, it took less than 48 hours to resolve whatever issue I was facing.

> For a Google project, this was somewhere between "space aliens" and "narnia" on the Scale of Surprising Things.

[...]

> My goal here is to finally put to rest this feeling that everyone has. There's some kind of reluctance to apply to TFRC. People always end up asking stuff like this:

> "I'm just a university student, not an established researcher. Should I apply?"

> Yes!

> "I'm just here to play around a bit with TPUs. I don't have any idea what I'm doing, but I'll poke around a bit and see what's up. Should I apply?"

> Heck yeah!

> "I have a Serious Research Project in mind. I'd like to evaluate whether the Cloud TPU VM platform is sufficient for our team's research goals. Should I apply?"

> Absolutely. But whoever you are, you've probably applied by now. Because everyone is realizing that TFRC is how you accomplish your research goals.

I expect that if you apply, you'll get your activation email within a few hours. Of course, you better get in quick. My goal here was to cause a stampede. Right now, in my experience, you'll be up and running by tomorrow. But if ten thousand people show up from HN, I don't know if that will remain true. :)

I feel a bit bad to be talking at length at TFRC. But then I remembered that none of this is off-topic in the slightest. GPT-J was proof of everything above. No TFRC, no GPT-J. The whole reason that the world can enjoy GPT-J now is because anyone can show up and start doing as many effective things as you can possibly learn.

It was all thanks to TFRC, the Cloud TPU team, the JAX team, the XLA compiler team -- hundreds of people, who have all managed to gift us this amazing opportunity. Yes, they want to win the ML mindshare war. But they know the way to win it is to care deeply about helping you achieve every one of your research goals.

Think of it like a side hobby. Best part is, it's free. (Just watch out for the egress bandwidth, ha. Otherwise you'll be talking with GCP support for your $500 refund -- and yes, that's an unpleasant experience.)