[rumblefrog]

Robotaxi & Optumus robot still looks to be years and years away. However, I'm pretty fond of the idea of having distributed compute nodes that performs computations when idle, the idea of reclaiming parking lots, the induction charging and vacuum bots looks pretty sleek as well.

[DaiPlusPlus]

> distributed compute nodes that performs computations when idle

I can't imagine that working well for latency-sensitive applications... like self-driving cars.

[lawn]

Running compute nodes in cars is honestly an even dumber idea than renting out your own car as a taxi.

[kmlx]

> dumber idea than renting out your own car as a taxi.

your car is doing nothing for most of it’s lifetime. renting it out via turo or as a taxi makes sense.

[elAhmo]

Or maybe you can just use a taxi if you need it, instead of buying a car to be used as a taxi?

It would be worth running the numbers on this, it is more viable to just take taxi rides for a year, compared to how much would payments and potential income net from a scheme like this. Of course if it ever sees the light of the day.

[FireBeyond]

> your car is doing nothing for most of it’s lifetime. renting it out via turo or as a taxi makes sense.

A lifetime that will be massively shortened by it running as a taxi 20 hours a day.

[mplewis]

He just bought a massive data center with thousands of Nvidia boards. Why would the car be an efficient place to do the same work?

[mavhc]

Because getting GWs of power into one building and the cooling it is expensive. Why not let other people buy the computer, provide the power, and it won't need expensive cooling.

Question is: are there enough high latency distributed workloads to sell?

[throwaway48476]

High latency distributed with low security requirements. Until homomophic encryption works.

[randerson]

And resilient enough to handle nodes having an accident, catching fire in a flood, parking underground with no signal for days, pausing to be used as a car...

This is an unreliable spot instance at best, with none of the features one can normally attach to an instance (like storage, managed databases, ...). How fast can its Internet be? Will owners need to pay for Starlink too? (What about when parked indoors?)

It would have to be cheaper than all regular hosting options by a long shot for anyone to consider this. A very niche, low-paying market, in other words.

[mavhc]

Doesn't distributed computing generally cope with nodes going offline?

The point is it's just a way to use free compute that's sitting around, if you want to sign up to use it you'd obviously make sure it was in wifi range

[rumblefrog]

I don't believe it would be efficient, or do I know what compute load he intends these to be. But it's some use for idling hardware.