A16Z is consistently the most embarrassing VC firm at any given point in time. I guess optimistically they might be doing “outrage marketing” but it feels more like one of those places where the CEO is just an idiot and tells his employees to jump on every trend.
The funny part is that they still make money. It seems like once you’ve got the connections, being a VC is a very easy job these days.
This article is a great way to showcase A16Z standinging head and shoulders above other VCs with REAL technical expertise in the partnership. Love reading this kind of stuff, but the article really needs a price to put this in perspective. It would be the VC that would ignore price, lol, but roughing this out it looks like it costs 45k to build this thing. Seems, at first glance, that this is a cost efficient way to dodge buying a Kia Carnival and get a tier-1 GPU workstation..
> access to raw compute is still one of the biggest bottlenecks
> We are planning to test and make a limited number of these
So this does approximately nothing to solve the original problem of supply and cost. Even if you sold it at a loss, that GPU is still going to be expensive.
Just be honest and say you thought it would be cool and you're not Y Combinator so you gotta do whatever you can to make your firm seem like a special smart kids club.
> personal AI Workstation delivers complete control over your environment, latency reduction, custom configurations and setups, and the privacy of running all workloads locally.
What's the recommended operating system with support for this hardware and local compute without cloud telemetry/identity?
How much heat does it generate and how loud is it at full tilt? Try keep comparing it to a modern under-desk computer, but I’m not sure you’d want to have that thing in the same room while you’re using it?
If you can’t already just buy a Lenovo or Dell workstation with this configuration, I’m sure you can just buy 4x GPUs and plug them into a base system that will support them.
Who is buying hardware this expensive from a business that probably doesn’t really know how to do (or isn’t setup to do) proper manufacturing tests?
This is the not-so-distant-future that a lot of people don’t see. We’re in the AI mainframe era and it’s coming to the pc era soon. I hope that’s what Apple is waiting on. Perhaps we will buy LLMs and install them locally one day too like a video game.
If you actually want a good multi-GPU system, just get an NVIDIA-designed system. There's no good reason to try to design and build one yourself when you will be relying almost entirely on NVIDIA cards and their multi-GPU communication.
In less than a year when A16z is finished with the few, pointless experiments they want to run on this and it is relegated to a closet forgotten, some poor founder is going to see it appear as part of their term sheet. "Oh, yes, $75,000 of our $500,000 commit is compensated through this state-of-the-art AI Workstation"
A rough price out using new egg/microcenter pricing, substituting a few items where they didn't specify a specific item/brand. I didn't bother trying to figure out what case they used.
Can you guys make one more that I could stop by and pick up from your office (and pay for, if you care for that sort of thing)? I checked with Puget Systems, but they are only doing 3 cards max.
My only question is: why not Zen 5? No suitable motherboards?
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 51.3 ms ] threadThe funny part is that they still make money. It seems like once you’ve got the connections, being a VC is a very easy job these days.
Based on what? your feelings?
> being a VC is a very easy job these days.
There you go. Why hasn't everyone who have connections became VC.
> We are planning to test and make a limited number of these
So this does approximately nothing to solve the original problem of supply and cost. Even if you sold it at a loss, that GPU is still going to be expensive.
Just be honest and say you thought it would be cool and you're not Y Combinator so you gotta do whatever you can to make your firm seem like a special smart kids club.
I’m glad they did. It’s weird and different.
What's the recommended operating system with support for this hardware and local compute without cloud telemetry/identity?
Who is buying hardware this expensive from a business that probably doesn’t really know how to do (or isn’t setup to do) proper manufacturing tests?
> But making this article should be a humiliation.
Article? It's their f*king website. Did you say the same when someone post their complaint about LLM on their blog?
Grand total: ~ $41,000
Motherboard https://www.newegg.com/gigabyte-mh53-g40-amd-ryzen-threadrip... $895
CPU https://www.microcenter.com/product/674313/amd-ryzen-threadr... - $3500
Cooler https://www.newegg.com/p/3C6-013W-002G6 $585
RAM https://www.newegg.com/a-tech-256gb/p/1X5-006W-00702 $1600
SSDs https://www.newegg.com/crucial-2tb-t700-nvme/p/N82E168201563... $223 x 4 = $892
GPUs https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16888892012 - $8295 x 4 = $33,180
Case https://www.newegg.com/fractal-design-atx-full-tower-north-s... $195
Power Supply https://www.newegg.com/thermaltake-toughpower-gf3-series-ps-... - $314
My only question is: why not Zen 5? No suitable motherboards?