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Comment by ingenieroariel | Hacker News Reader

On number 2, even if you are John Carmack you may have trouble getting the right people on the phone.

https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1305967411749892098...

Anyone at Google Cloud out there? It seems I can't get my GPU quota raised to 40 x V100 as an independent researcher. I was told that setting up a website would help, but I would rather not. I can pay the bills...

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If you're actually an independent researcher, sometimes you can find professors at universities or national labs that are willing to help out in exchange for credits on the paper. I've had success at [redacted] labs in the New Mexico region as well as folks from my previous university. The trick is asking people who do research that's sort of adjacent to your field.

@ingenieroariel, sorry for this trouble. I am product manager for Cloud TPU, I would be happy to connect you with my GPU colleagues and also explore if Cloud TPU can help with your research as well. What's the best way to connect with you?

I gave up and moved to lambdalabs, then they ran out of quota across the board, and now I use a combination of Vast, and Coreweave today.

b-but you work for- why wouldn't they... you know what, never mind.

It is sometimes far more convenient to avoid the paper trail and bureaucracy of having to provision things internally, similarly I'm sure to how renting GPUs online for short periods of time avoids the issue of having to pay for the maintenance and time costs of maintaining them onsite.

Oh, I quit recently. Very surprisingly, I learned it was harder to get access to GPUs at big tech companies outside their dedicated research teams than it was for a scrappy hacker outside on side projects with lots of savings. So I quit to work on those projects. I miss not having a dedicated infra team but don’t miss having to beg for resources. I wanted to use google cloud since I use some of their other services for this, but could not figure out how to get them to increase quotas and take my money. I was willing to pay nearly double the hourly rate I am currently paying at coreweave to use only one cloud provider but they just wouldn’t sell me it

Out of curiosity, just how much resources are you able to access with google colab and can you use it for AI training? I’ve been becoming more interested in fintech and trying my hand at predictive/pattern recognition AI but the costs are incredibly prohibitive to getting started, both hardware and data.

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