
Ask HN: Why did those ideas to pool cryto mines for deep learning fail? - kennethjiang
With cryto currency price hovering below profitable lines for most crypto mines, it seems to make so much business sense to pool these GPU resources for deep learning.<p>There have been quite a few attempts at it, such as https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aicrypto.ai&#x2F;, https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vast.ai&#x2F;, and https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;gpumining&#x2F;comments&#x2F;86ofw2&#x2F;rent_out_your_gpu_compute_to_ai_researchers_and&#x2F;. However none of them seems to have gone anywhere.<p>Why?
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duxup
Is it profitable for a miner to rent out time on their mining systems?

The reddit thread says "double what he was making by mining Ethereum, and in
return he would let me train my neural networks on his computer at
significantly less than what I would have had to pay AWS." That is pretty
significant but I'm kinda surprised it that much less than AWS, does AWS have
a really high markup?

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vpEfljFL
AWS has to cover taxes, vacations, datacenter construction, monitoring,
duplication with enterprise level components, pay rate for electricity is
higher for commercial companies and so on.

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malux85
Probably because our datasets are just as valuable as the neural network
topology and weights, and as the founder of several companies that use deep
learning theres no way I'd let our datasets go out to machines we don't
control

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billconan
Who is doing deep learning at scale? Google, fb and nvidia? Do they really
care about miners’ spare GPUs. What about the risk of leaking training data to
public?

Is model parallelization solved yet? Especially Without high speed
connectivity?

