[authorfly]

Same. But in time, I realise, you don't see 90% of the things that block companies. Startups lose their main marketing channel, their plan for scaling is thwarted by quotas or random API limits that were unexpected, core team members leave.

The trick is your strategy and what's in place to survive and turn into those waves when they come in the end. Seems like you did this as you had more success elsewhere.

[wil421]

If your business is dependent on big Tech credits and quotas, you’re going to had a bad time. Maybe even lose your business entirely due to an ELUA change.

[authorfly]

The problem is, what other option is there sometimes?

Quotas in this case refers to needing to request access to GPUs. Those reviews takes minutes or days depending on your relationship, and are often final.

Its possible that none of the cloud providers offering GPUs will ever allow you quotas high enough to scale to profitable margins, and there's nothing you can do about it except try and host in house (which would be mad). But the GPUs being on cloud makes that very uneconomical and they are in high demand.

This was all as true in 2019 or 2022 (more so with TPUs in 2020 I should say) as it is now. It's not a ChatGPT thing.

2013 is approximately when university and national computing units became relatively useless compared to GPU cloud compute. This stopped a wave of would-be university spin offs from having access to sufficient compute to compete.