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davidbuniat

109 karma · joined November 17, 2014

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davidbuniat··on Ran CC Autonomously for 15h, 2x Speed Up on TPC-H, ASAN-verified, Cost $160
We let our Software Factory run for 15 hours autonomously. Output was 83 lines of highly optimized C++ code. 714 lines of tests. 8:1 test to code ratio. It fixed the bottleneck in a large codebase. Improved the TPC-H benchmark 2x. Verified memory leak using ASAN. Spent $160 of LLM calls.
davidbuniat··on Chat with Any GitHub Repo – Demo and GitHub Repo
totally, @MuffinFlavored, super-exciting.
davidbuniat··on Show HN: Build and run automations in the browser with natural language
nice, pretty impressive to go from 10% to 70%. Do you also do autogpt style looping with reasking and verification until proper DSL is creating?
davidbuniat··on Show HN: Build and run automations in the browser with natural language
This is awesome, curious what is your DSL look like and what is the accuracy of LLM translating into your DSL?
davidbuniat··on Launch HN: Activeloop (YC S18) – Data lake for deep learning
my pleasure, let us know if you have any feedback, would love to see you succeed wtih Deep Lake. :)
davidbuniat··on Launch HN: Activeloop (YC S18) – Data lake for deep learning
thank you so much! We've recently announced a broad strategic collaboration with Intel Corporation to advance the field of AI data infrastructure. More specifically, this means initiatives in making sure Deep Lake datasets are trained super-smoothly on 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors with built-in AI accelerators, as well as a range of technological improvements to Deep Lake given Intel's know-how in the field. Together, we will hopefully abstract away the need to build complex data infrastructure in-house :)
davidbuniat··on Launch HN: Activeloop (YC S18) – Data lake for deep learning
One more thing regarding the compression -> you can both deeplake.link() to your raw data lake without touching it, or use deeplake.read() which preservers the compression as long as it matches with tensor default compression.

https://docs.deeplake.ai/en/latest/deeplake.html?highlight=l... https://docs.deeplake.ai/en/latest/deeplake.html#deeplake.re...

davidbuniat··on Launch HN: Activeloop (YC S18) – Data lake for deep learning
There's indeed plenty of tools out there, so the next few years are very interesting in terms of seeing which approach gets adopted by the wider audience. Feedback from the community (inc. feedback from you!) is instrumental in designing a tool that works well and addresses all the needs, so thanks a lot for your input re: CLI and branding. :)

Good observation, we've made sure that datasets can evolve better as you go. Specifically for your use case, you can query subsets of data and materialize it on the fly to be streamed, and then go back to a specific dataset "view" (i.e. saved query), as needed.

See how this works at around 5:50 here - https://youtu.be/SxsofpSIw3k

As for your last question, when the jpeg is appended using its file path, the compressed bytes get stored in the dataset without decompression/recompression. When the data is accessed as a numpy array, then the jpeg bytes are decompressed.

For researchers in Academia, our Growth plan is free. Since you work at a startup, the trial for Growth plan is for two weeks. If you want access, hit us up in the Community slack (slack.activeloop.ai - or you can just test the querying on public activeloop datasets!)

davidbuniat··on Launch HN: Activeloop (YC S18) – Data lake for deep learning
Ah, thank you so much for noticing this! this is a very important piece of feedback (we will fix it shortly). What we meant was the 10TB is the first tier of the enterprise plans, and the rest are more custom-billed (typically because those also require other custom integrations, etc).

If you find any other points of confusion, please send them our way, and we will fix it, the community has been instrumental over the years in iterating on the product! :)

davidbuniat··on Launch HN: Activeloop (YC S18) – Data lake for deep learning
As a matter of fact, I do agree - the CV space is less crowded (until now). That's hopefully where we come in!

thanks a lot for the input, and thanks for trying us out. You know, it's always a work-in-progress, but we've actually done a major overhaul - this is our biggest release yet and I'd love it if you gave it a try, especially the querying feature we're super-proud of. :) https://docs.activeloop.ai/tutorials/querying-datasets

here's a couple of playbooks on how the new features (visualization + querying + version control) play together to solve complex workflows.

- https://docs.activeloop.ai/playbooks/training-with-lineage - https://docs.activeloop.ai/playbooks/evaluating-model-perfor... - https://docs.activeloop.ai/playbooks/training-reproducibilit...

davidbuniat··on Launch HN: Activeloop (YC S18) – Data lake for deep learning
thanks for the context and links! I replied to your comment slightly above in one comment. :)
davidbuniat··on Launch HN: Activeloop (YC S18) – Data lake for deep learning
Re: HF - we know them and admire their work (primarily, until very recently, focused on NLP, while we focus mostly on CV). As mentioned in the post, a large part of Deep Lake, including the Python-based dataloader and dataset format, is open source as well - https://github.com/activeloopai/deeplake.

Likewise, we curate a list of large open source datasets here -> https://datasets.activeloop.ai/docs/ml/, but our main thing isn't aggregating datasets (focus for HF datasets), but rather providing people with a way to manage their data efficiently. That being said, all of the 125+ public datasets we have are available in seconds with one line of code. :)

We haven't benchmarked against HF datasets in a while, but Deep Lake's dataloader is much, much faster in third-party benchmarks (see this https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.13705 and here for an older version, that was much slower than what we have now, see this: https://pasteboard.co/la3DmCUR2iFb.png). HF under the hood uses Git-LFS (to the best of my knowledge) and is not opinionated on formats, so LAION just dumps Parquet files on their storage.

While your setup would work for a few TBs, scaling to PB would be tricky including maintaining your own infrastructure. And yep, as you said NAS/NFS would neither be able to handle the scale (especially writes with 1k workers). I am also slightly curious about your use of mmap files with image/video compressed data (as zero-copy won’t happen) unless you decompress inside the GPU ;), but would love to learn more from you! Re: pricing thanks for the feedback, storage is one component and customly priced for PB-scale workloads.

davidbuniat··on Launch HN: Activeloop (YC S18) – Data lake for deep learning
You can store your data either remotely or locally (see here on how https://docs.activeloop.ai/getting-started/creating-datasets...).

You can then visualize your datasets if their stored on our cloud, in AWS/GCP, or you can drag and drop your local dataset in Deep Lake format into our UI (https://docs.activeloop.ai/dataset-visualization)

We do, with version control, Python based dataloader and dataset format being open source! Please check out https://github.com/activeloopai/deeplake.

davidbuniat··on Launch HN: Activeloop (YC S18) – Data lake for deep learning
Thanks - it's very insightful to also hear your perspective as someone coming in from the BI space (if you have any more insights, please post them here, too). We have this internal joke where when one says their analytics is based on regressions, it's really an excel sheet, and if they say it's AI, it's a simple Ordinary Least Squares regression, and only a handful do actual AI/ML.

From what we are seeing in the market, both domains grow, but with an overlap, and it's expanding, too. I think while BI/Analytics would still be a major space, we would see more DL-based novel applications generating increasingly more business value (i.e. self-driving cars, robotics, agritech). After all, even in VERY traditional workflows/companies like economic growth estimation, we're seeing DL being applied (e.g. they look at nightlight satellite imagery to estimate economic growth/urbanization).

So to answer your question, for some parts, I think it would be the former (complement), and other applications it would call for replacement (particularly in the cases where companies use multi-modal data).

davidbuniat··on Launch HN: Activeloop (YC S18) – Data lake for deep learning
"...I would argue that outside big tech, this is 0.1%."

Fair point regarding the unlabeled/unstructured data. One could also argue that labeled data isn't going to be a prerequisite forever (see https://ai.facebook.com/blog/the-first-high-performance-self...). We see a very sharp rise in unstructured data use for ML (especially a large spike caused by large language models like Dall-E 2 and Stable Diffusion). In my opinion, the majority of the novel use cases are outside of big tech, and we also see a trend in "legacy" companies like media, manufacturing, etc. start building dedicated ML teams. The industry is still nascent, but it is growing fast. Frankly, we see the pain points we're solving resonate with so many more companies than just a year ago.

Agree re Snowflake/Databricks, they are partners rather than competitors. We sit on top of S3/GCS or other blob storages and currently are competing with various in-house solutions that ML scientists built themselves. I do see your point regarding large foundational models that would be only fine-tuned on the tail end for various use cases. I believe there still would be still companies building foundational models from scratch (currently at 5 billion images) so they can serve more application-specific products and unstructured data generators that partner with those companies creating a good enough market for the tool.

davidbuniat··on Launch HN: Activeloop (YC S18) – Data lake for deep learning
a very fair point, we do usually say that our main (possible) competition are the "traditional" data lakes! We've spent 4+ years designing this system to be specifically resolving the issue for unstructured AI data like videos, images, audio (and multimodal datasets, like the ones used to train models like Stable Diffusion, for instance).

Our main competitive advantage against the players you've mentioned is just that - our bet is that Deep Learning will overtake traditional BI workflows (especially with >90% of data generated today being unstructured), and we've been preparing for it. Traditional "BI datalakes" are pretty inefficient when it comes to storing the data specifically for deep learning workflows. They currently also lack an entire suite of key features (visualization for those data types, query engine based on tensors, etc.) to be able to successfully convince the potential users.

As a matter of fact, we're seeing not only adoption from AI-first companies/startups who are building their infrastructure from the ground up, but mature companies who are hitting the limits of the traditional setups.

Keeping that in mind, we're working on making the onboarding for such companies much easier, so their cost of switching to a more efficient/performant setup is much lower.

As for Databricks specifically, we see them more as a complement, rather than a competitor.

davidbuniat··on Show HN: Bugout.dev – Crash and usage reports for developer tools
That's pretty great! This is like mixpanel for devtools. How do you address security and privacy concerns on behalf of developers?
davidbuniat··on Aim: Record, search and compare ML training runs
Oh nice, it's like open-source version of W&B, and seems much better than Tensorboard. How many experiments I can compare at the same time without crashing chrome? :)
davidbuniat··on Show HN: Locust – “Git diff” over abstract syntax trees
We have been an early adopter at https://github.com/activeloopai/Hub. It helped me to quickly review large PRs that otherwise took us long time to understands the high-level picture.
davidbuniat··on Launch HN: Snark AI (YC S18) – Distributed Low-Cost GPUs for Deep Learning
Following your notation, consider our new price will be $x+y', where y' is the mining price difference.

You are right my claim that y'<y is slightly weak (was based on "gap is not negligible" assumption, see below).

"gap is not negligible" - means if y' gets near to y, then y will get even higher and there will be always a market gap, which I think you disagree with.

Based on your suggestion, on extreme scenario I would soften my claim to y'=<y, without us making profit. :)

davidbuniat··on Launch HN: Snark AI (YC S18) – Distributed Low-Cost GPUs for Deep Learning
Lets agree that if the mining price goes up, it will be always cheaper than public cloud. Otherwise, you would have run mining on AWS/GCP and be profitable. In this scenario, we are still able to offer cheaper price to the customers and higher price to the miners even by just binary switching. Assuming the gap is not negligible.

If the price goes down, customers will be able to set lower price. As long as GPU holders profit margin is high enough given electricity and maintenance costs, they will do the compute.

If the marketplace matures, pricing of mining, deep learning, rendering and other tasks will be driven by the market. At Snark AI we are working on towards creating this marketplace that will provide optimal benefits to all parties.

davidbuniat··on Launch HN: Snark AI (YC S18) – Distributed Low-Cost GPUs for Deep Learning
That's what we count on as well.
davidbuniat··on Launch HN: Snark AI (YC S18) – Distributed Low-Cost GPUs for Deep Learning
In case of crypto downturn renting GPUs will be even cheaper. Actually, it will be a bigger win for our users and also for us.
davidbuniat··on Launch HN: Snark AI (YC S18) – Distributed Low-Cost GPUs for Deep Learning
Good suggestion! Our cheapest instances are actually perfect for learning ML/DL. We are also working on adding Jupyter support so it will be even easier. What do you think?
davidbuniat··on Launch HN: Snark AI (YC S18) – Distributed Low-Cost GPUs for Deep Learning
Yep, totally agree!
davidbuniat··on Launch HN: Snark AI (YC S18) – Distributed Low-Cost GPUs for Deep Learning
Great! Once you rent a P106 you have full access to the GPU, and we don't run mining or ML tasks.

If you want to deploy large-scale computation and significantly reduce your costs, we can help by running mining at the same time under your consent. This only applies to Deep Learning inference.

davidbuniat··on Launch HN: Snark AI (YC S18) – Distributed Low-Cost GPUs for Deep Learning
Great you asked this. We try to say that for privacy sensitive data processing (e.g. face recognition), we are eager to work closely with clients and hardware providers to ensure security and compliance to regulations such as Privacy Shield, GDPR, etc. Do you have a such use case, would be great to get in touch with.
davidbuniat··on Launch HN: Snark AI (YC S18) – Distributed Low-Cost GPUs for Deep Learning
@TekMol, we can give a try together to see if the streaming speed will be enough for running your WebGL application smoothly.
davidbuniat··on Launch HN: Snark AI (YC S18) – Distributed Low-Cost GPUs for Deep Learning
Thanks for asking, thats a good point! Compared to spot/preemptible, your files will be persistent. You can stop your running pod, add more GPUs and then continue training your model.
davidbuniat··on Launch HN: Snark AI (YC S18) – Distributed Low-Cost GPUs for Deep Learning
Haha, jokingly we use GPUs on our landing page to rent out to others. :D On a side note, animations are slightly tough, need to optimize them.

Regarding WebGL, actually that is an interesting point, would like to know more about the use case.

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