Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height | Hacker News

"Huge compute bills" usually come from training, or to be more precise, hyperparameter search that's required before you find a model that works well. You could also fail to find such a model, but that's another discussion. So yeah, you could spend one or two FTE salaries' (or one deep learning PhD's) worth of cash on finding such models for your startup if you insist on helping Jeff Bezos to wipe his tears with crisp hundred dollar bills. That's if you know what you're doing of course. Literally unlimited amounts could be spent if you don't. Or you could do the same for a fraction of the cost by stuffing a rack in your office with consumer grade 2080ti's. Just don't call it a "datacenter" or NVIDIA will have a stroke. Is that too much money? Not in most typical cases, I'd think. If the competitive advantage of what you're doing with DL does not offset the cost of 2 meatspace FTEs, you're doing it wrong. That, once again, assumes that you know what you're doing, and aren't doing deep learning for the sake of deep learning. Also, if your startup is venture funded, AWS will give you $100K in credit, hoping that you waste it by misconfiguring your instances and not paying attention to their extremely opaque billing (which is what most of their startup customers proceed to doing pretty much straight away). If you do not make these mistakes, that $100K will last for some time, after which you could build out the aforementioned rack full of 2080ti's on prem.