OpenAI Selects Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to Extend Microsoft Azure AI Platform | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI Selects Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to Extend Microsoft Azure AI Platform

oracle.com

56 pointstosh75 comments

Oracle Cloud is a bad product and I wouldn't recommend. I'm guessing Oracle practically gifted OpenAI compute to make this possible and that this announcement is the whole purpose (i.e. "look at us, we're equal to AWS/Azure!!! OpenAI runs here!!!").

Oracle and Google Cloud have been doing this stuff constantly.

Given that Microsoft and Google are already giving away huge amounts of compute to AI companies, Oracle must be outright paying them to do this.

Well, Microsoft is also using Oracle cloud. I mean, somebody has to use Oracle cloud after all lol

I've found Oracle's free tier quite generous. I guess OpenAI does as well.

It's sort of like a crack dealer's free tier. You know it's going to end miserably but you just can't help yourself.

Not necessarily, use it for testing only (not production) and you will be fine.

I run a little kube cluster on it that serves as the brain for my home lab on it and it’s been cranking along just fine for the better part of half a year. It’s all IaC and ephemeral so if it died tomorrow I could just restart it. Quite generous for $0

Can you feasibly run a homelab C&C server on the free tier of any of the big 3?

It’s possible to run a single node cluster on GCP for almost free, especially if you’re creative with spot instance. But afaik, not really otherwise. OCI is far and away more generous, giving you 4 dedicated always on nodes, which is just enough to run a decent mini cluster

I know you're talking about the cloud offerings, but the idea of using just a little bit of crack as "not production" is hilarious to me.

> a crack dealer's free tier

Pretty sure GCP & AWS employ a lot of ex-Oracle people.

I also have a couple of ARM servers there, nothing fancy. The internal networks and machine are extremely snappy for what they provide. Even the containers I threw in run great.

If you need small needs, it's a good provider. The dashboard is very convoluted, though.

Mines been running fine for years now

How much crack do you do a day?

Where do live that people are giving away crack?

Yeah, I use their free tier. At $0 it's the best offering. But I end up with racknerd for just raw Linux machine that I manage myself with `iptables` and friends.

I'm guessing the free tier available to OAI is not the same free tier available to anyone else.

I’ve heard of people being cut off without warning on the free tier.

Yes. Not only are there bad actors, but oracle aggressively culls underutilized instances. If you sign up and attach your billing info you won’t get that happening to you. I know, it sounds silly, but once I did that I had no issues. It’s difficult to even get instances provisioned if you don’t do that, it’s really only possible by having a script that runs and continually retries/requests instances. I’ve had my billing info tied to it and never had an issue with being charged or having instances deprovisioned the entire half year I’ve been using it.

They've been out of instances for years on free tier now. E.g. there is no free Ampere available anymore effectively.

I used their free tier. Didn’t meet my needs. Tried to delete my account. It fails to delete my tenent, can’t talk to support because it is free tier. Email support refused to help. Told me to pay to talk to support. So they want me to pay so I can have them delete my account.

> "look at us, we're equal to AWS/Azure!!! OpenAI runs here!!!"

Possible, as they have lost deals even in countries where they enjoy MFN: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/oracle-ceo-confus... / https://archive.is/zO35B

TIL MFN: Most-Favored-Nation

Wikipedia:

> In international economic relations and international politics, most favoured nation is a status or level of treatment accorded by one state to another in international trade.

We run https://pico.sh on their free tier, can’t complain about our experience.

Have you actually used it?

They just happen to have many GPUs and a SLA, the rest doesn't matter.

What's bad about their cloud product? Also, GCP is way better than azure, so it's not a question of equality.

I've run large GPU clusters on OCI, quite happily. The hardware and interconnects are very good - NVIDIA has a good relationship with them because they are one of the clouds not making their own silicon. GPU clusters are Oracle's path to breaking into top tier of the clouds and IMO they do it well.

It's the high-level services where OCI is worth avoiding. Even core tech like object storage has been a problem.

Open Container Initiative?

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

God speed, OCI is a pile of garbage. Once had them delete every single one of our production servers in the middle of the work day (in the hundreds of instances) due to an uncaught billing error.

Triage took over 3 three days and there was a significant amount of lost customer data and financial impact.

I wouldn't recommend OCI if they were the last cloud provider on earth.

> Triage took over 3 three days

were their billing reminders going to your spam folder or something?

No, internal on their side. Nothing to do with ours.

Oracle lawyers, ever waiting to pounce on new prey, extend their claws.

Oracle lawyers- Tucking their pencils away- Extend their sharp claws

Oracle evil - check. Microsoft privacy violating mess - check. Azure rolling disaster zone - check.

What could possibly go wrong?

On their conference call tonight, Larry Ellison indicated Oracle will be building a dedicated data center for OpenAI to use for training, with 1 GW of power, and its own power plant and DLC. Stocked with newest NVIDIA chips.

OpenAIs govt services hub? #speculation

Why would OpenAI not build their own data center?

Running a data center comes with its own challenges. I imagine they don't want to be in the business of running data centers. Additionally running only 1 might have too much overhead.

Maybe we can just start referring to them as the "Axis of Evil" or the "Unholy triumvirate".

So, I guess OpenAI really is evil.

At this point it's only a matter of who's got those damn gpu's and enough of them, or not, willing to deal with, eww, Oracle even. Since already in bed with Microsoft, why serve a lesser evil - upgrade to Oracle.

Big AI is just the same old boys club that governed IT since the 1980s, it seems.

I seem to recall oracle having a bunch of GPUs for no particularly obvious reason. Maybe this is them utilising that

Does Apple still have a close relationship with Oracle? I wonder if this is related.

Looks like Oracle employees have managed to beat the brigading protection on HN.

If we ever get skynet from it - never expected less from Oracle EvilCorp Co.

This is super sketch for others on the platform. First hand experience from using OCI - they have severe capacity constraints and need _lots_ of heads up when you want to increase your usage of things. Auto scaling it ain't.

So if OpenAI starts drawing significant resources from their cloud hardware, good luck gettin your own. Including me :)

Isn’t it adorable when two grifters meet their match?

Lots of negative comments about Oracle. If they're so bad, how come PMs and higher ups keep choosing them? Is there no resistance voice from engineers?

Edit: I'm getting downvoted by engineers. I guess they have to vent somehow... How about take your downvote to the PM who's going to sign a new Oracle contract?

From experience working with these people for many years, it is mostly because they are fuckwits. No joke. Literally no objectivity or capability to reason about logically. The first vendor that gets in the door and shows them a shiny turd and they sign a contract which is difficult to get out of.

Anyone who is technical in those orgs is either very junior and stepped straight in a cow shit out of college, has a pension they are counting down to or is so utterly disinterested that they don't give a shit about anything other than the coffee break or the end of the day.

My capacity in those orgs was the overpaid consultant who came in, looked at what they were doing and told them they were stupid in a huge word document and then leave with a pocket full of cash with no changes ever being made.

In case you’re wondering if this is hyperbole — it’s not. This is my daily lived experience at $dayjob.

A good sales person on a golf course with a VP can do a lot of damage

s/golf course/[strip club|ski/beach resort|yacht vacay]/ as suits the particular VP

You think that voice carries more weight than a golf junket?

Oracle is in the business of selling career insurance for executives.

I think it is because they are significantly cheaper than the alternatives.

Oracle? Oracle is the most expensive at everything.

There were consultants specializing in optimizing Oracle bills way before they existed for AWS.

Last I looked, their core IaaS services (compute, storage, networking) were cheaper than AWS.

You haven’t ever compared costs of IaaS across clouds. For those that do that regularly, OCI is often half the cost of their competitors for typical compute, storage and networking workloads.

Used to work at Oracle. They keep winning deals because at the C-level it's about:

- enterprise-grade features

- completeness of vision

- long term viability

- dependable support

- availability of talent

And no, normally they don't want to hear from engineers.

Believe somewhere in the analysis of these million-dollar deals, we missed one Harvard classmate doing a solid to another.

I was once apart of a team evaluating storage solutions from multiple vendors. We had rows of racks dedicated to each vendor. Between production IT, production engineers, and even the operators doing the daily grind, there was a clear loser and 2 very good/close winners. We ran our stress tests for months to generate all sorts of useful metrics. Then, corporate comes along and makes a massive PR release about the new deal they just signed with the absolute worst vendor.

Eventually, after production came to a grinding halt because the storage solution did not work, there was no follow up PR campaign about the abject failure of that partnership. C-suite people can fuck up the easiest decisions because of perks/kick backs.

But OCI falls down on essentially all that stuff vs AWS or even GCP.

OCI is cheap; that's the USP.

Selling into the enterprise is about doing your research on who the key people are, who has the purse strings, what the drivers for that company are, and what your competitors are doing with pricing, bundling, and their pitches.

Very little of this involves talking to code monkeys, unless there's a technical person who is already well-regarded enough that general managers, C*O, and the like, listen to their opinions.

The engineers in the company are usually sufficiently contemptuous of "politics" and "people pleasing" and "bean counters" and "marketing" that they aren't part of those discussions, because they've already made it clear that they hold the people making the calls in contempt. Oracle sales people are more than happy to fill the gap.

The amount of shit software my org has bought with seemingly no technical people in the meetings in mindboggling. For some reason the MO seems to be to bring the tech people in after the purchase to 'integrate'. Maybe because managers know the technical people would object and they just want to buy a solution now so it seems they are worth the inflated salary.

Oracle's database is actually pretty good, if price is no object and you've got a team of competent DBAs looking after it, who'll lock you out of most of the footguns. Particularly a few decades ago, when MySQL's query planning was very basic.

And sure, once you're locked in they'll jack the price up more and more every year - or worse, your business will grow and the bosses will try to control costs by not licensing more CPUs. But it's not your money, and you can always just go work somewhere else, whereupon the vendor lock-in isn't your problem.

If you have a team of competent DBAs are you going to do well with most workloads on most RDBMS?

> How about take your downvote to the PM who's going to sign a new Oracle contract?

LOL at the thought your average Senior PM at any decent size org is the one deciding what cloud provider the company is going with...

Because they get wined and dined? Because the salesperson made unreasonable promises? Because the people making the decisions are completely disconnected from the people that have to work with what they purchase?

My last company got tricked into buying Oracle DB servers, it was going to “solve all our problems”. Yeah, the moron who pushed for going with Oracle fucked off to screw over some other company and we were left with 2 paperweights. Not before wasting months of dev time to adapt our application code to work with Oracle’s laughable limitations. A few years later I think the production engineers turned them into a NAS so they did more than just collect dust.

I wouldn’t take free servers from Oracle (physical or in the cloud).

Lots of shade being thrown, I'm surprised at all the toxic bile. All cloud providers are fundamentally in a race to the bottom for commoditization of compute infrastructure. The competition should be desirable.

Anyhow, if I had to guess why ClosedAI made this decision, well there are lots of big companies who like Oracle Cloud because if the spend is sufficient, Oracle will literally build and then support whatever configurations you want in any region across the entire globe. Good luck getting that level of care from AWS, Azure, or Goggle.

In my experience OCI is still better than GCP, not that it's really saying much, AWS has been the "best" IME :)

Clouds can't love you back.

What are your gripes with GCP? I've been using it for every project for a while, and am super happy with it, especially GKE.

Maybe you weren't burned by the near periodic massive GCP outages from 2019 - 2023. More power to you, but I'm not signing up for more of that.

6+ years on GCP across half a dozen kubernetes clusters here... very little to complain about IME. Have fun with Oracle.

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