THE SCENE Blockchain and crypto have been criticized for years as a “solution in search of a problem.” Now some industry entrepreneurs may have found the problem: A shortage of compute power needed to train AI models. The solution: Researchers and startups that can’t get graphics processing units (GPUs) can use blockchain-based markets to quickly and easily access compute power for a fraction of what major providers charge. Bitcoin miners and others spurred an arms race for GPUs needed to conduct calculations to keep systems running, but demand slumped when the digital currency market collapsed last year. Now instead of simply cannibalizing the struggling crypto industry, some AI companies are leaning on the blockchain to distribute those same GPUs. Ishan Dhanani, a computer science graduate student at Columbia University, is an example of how upstarts are getting around GPU shortages through the blockchain. He wanted to start fine tuning Meta’s LLama2 open-source AI model to experiment on it, but ran into the reality that huge companies have swallowed up most of the compute power. He couldn’t obtain any through market leader Amazon Web Services, and smaller providers were always sold out. Getting access through Columbia was also a headache. That led him to the Akash Network, one of a handful of companies that have created protocols to allow owners of GPUs to rent them out on the blockchain, earning tokens for every minute the GPU is utilized. Dhanani was able to access a $15,000 Nvidia A100 for $1.10 per hour through Akash. It took him about seven hours to complete his work, for about the cost of a beer. Companies like Akash can offer cheaper access partly because the protocols are set up to run on their own, like a version of Airbnb or Uber without those companies taking commissions. Community members on the blockchain, incentivized with tokens, handle the nuts and bolts of the operation. As a result, the costs are low, with nobody except for the owners of the GPUs earning any significant revenue on the transaction. The experience spurred Dhanani and two friends to launch Agora Labs a few months ago to help what he calls “the GPU poor” more easily book time on GPUs via the blockchain.“ The OpenAIs and Anthropics can’t be the only ones that have the power to train and host models like ChatGPT,” he said.  UK-based Gensyn, which recently announced a $43 million Series A funding round, represents a huge venture capital bet that blockchain has a future facilitating the sale of GPU time for the AI industry. Gensyn is building a system that would vastly simplify the pricing model for training in AI, according to an interview with the company’s co-founders. Instead of paying for time on a GPU, Gensyn plans to estimate the overall time and cost of the training job and then spread the tasks around to computers all around the world, searching for the best prices. That strategy involves tackling a thorny technological problem: The more spread out the compute resources are, the more complicated the training gets. Gensyn co-founder Harry Grieve said when he was earning his PhD in deep learning, the scarcity of compute resources meant he was unable to fully complete his research in automating the development of AI models. “The only people who could do that research were Google and Microsoft,” he said. “I realized if I was in that position, a lot of other people in the world were in that position, which meant we weren’t moving as quickly towards a machine-learning future as we could be.” For Reed's view and the rest of the story, read here. → |
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