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syntaxing

Where does the EleutherAI computing resource and the money required to pay for it come from?

Edit: I think they got a grant from the TPU Research org

[1] https://sites.research.google/trc/

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Apply to TRC! You personally can get the same computing resources. https://blog.gpt4.org/jaxtpu

For some reason, everyone is reluctant to apply. I wrote that to dispel some of the hesitation. Wanting to play with TPUs is a fine reason to join.

Some reasons why TRC is awesome: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27728225

> For some reason, everyone is reluctant to apply

We just don't want another vendor lock-in. Especially for research projects. Maybe if TPUs were sold in the open market.

Turning down hundreds of thousands of dollars of cloud credits because of vendor lock-in is extremely shortsighted for the overwhelming majority of projects.

> extremely shortsighted

I think it is extremely LONG-sighted: an individual research institute might save $100k right now, but the lock-in might force 10x pay in 5 years to continue research. Not to mention it might affect ability of smaller institutes and individual researchers to enter the field, which is also worse for research as whole.

If Google jacks up the price of TPU or terminate the TPU usage because they don't like you, you're screwed. It's quite a high risk for commercial product companies.

This is super interesting, the way its worded, I honestly expected it to be for research scientist or ambitious projects like EluetherAI. Really appreciate the HN comment and blog post for that perspective!

As it says in the post the free compute from Google's TFRC and also a collaboration with Coreweave who pledged more.

Missed it when I was skimming the article but saw a reference to them in the repo

Also for what is worth TFRC is not really a grant grant. You just sign up and if they like you they give you access.

I think they do ask you what you are planning to use the resources for, what your qualifications are and make a decision to allocate and how many tpus based on that.

Yes, they do but it's not really a grant and they don't really follow up on what you do unless you contact them yourself. You just fill a form and if you get accepted get an email later with access. At least that's how it was when I got accepted but things might've changed since last I've heard.

Interesting, TIL! I never heard about them until today

They didn't go through Google. Some other DL company paid for it. It's on their discord.

they did both, tpu is provided by google and coreweave offers gpu runtimes

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