[jph00]

I'm one of the recipients of the AI grants, to support my work at fast.ai. I'm extremely grateful to a16z for their support. Here's some additional details based on questions I see in the comments:

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.

[Reviving1514]

Hi Jeremy,

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!)

[0xcde4c3db]

> previous-gen A6000 GPUs

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.

[Mascobot]

Thanks for all the work Jeremy! There's a large community of folks that have been learning from you, the Fast.ai community and your work. Super excited for this grant!

[rajko_rad]

Honored to have you in the inaugural cohort @jph00!!

[MichaelZuo]

> 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. ... the contract was clear and totally fair (even explicitly saying that a16z wasn't going to receive any kind of rights to anything)...

Thanks for sharing, that is generous, and a pretty solid sign of being honest businessmen.

[jdshaffer]

It makes me very happy to read about things like this -- support where it's needed and appreciated AND absolutely no strings attached. Wow. Wish there were more cases like this.

Best wishes in your work, jph00!

[jasrys]

Couldn't go to a better home. Thanks for making this field approachable.

[throwaway_89282]

Thanks for providing context Jeremy. Fast AI has done an admirable job in communicating its commitment to an ethical pursuit of AI advancement. Do you feel such a commitment aligns with the bellicose rhetoric found in a16z's vision? Here is Marc Andreessen in a recent essay...

"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.

Source: https://a16z.com/2023/06/06/ai-will-save-the-world/