Unvalidated Ideas #028

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Here's a fresh idea you can take out there and validate.

GPU Compute marketplace

At this point I probably don't need to convince you of how important Machine Learning and AI will be for the future. Let's skip past that.

Remember how everyone (OK not everyone) rushed out and bought all the GPUs they could find to do that cryptocurrency thing? OK good.

There are a lot of GPUs out there right now sitting idle, and there's a huge rising use case for them -- performing calculations that AI needs.

Companies are spending huge amounts of money to build their own AI capabilities -- Tesla's Dojo system is insane and most companies don't need that scale. Companies are diping their toes into ML/AI (or at least want to be seen as doing so), and without lots of GPU compute they won't be able to get their results.

GPU instance pricing on the major clouds would make anyone's eyes water. But unlike the traditional server space, it's not like cloud providers necessarily have access to magical hardware -- there are lot of consumers with high grade consumer cards as well.

Build a marketplace for GPU compute that's easy for both sellers of compute and buyers.

It's easy, all you have to do is:

• Find the most popular ML/AI toolset (this is either PyTorch or TensorFlow depending on who you ask)
• Build a way to use external (remote) GPUs with it (combine the native remote execution with a distributed job server)
• Build an standalone application (ex. with Tauri) that takes the guesswork out of using your GPU (it should be turn key)
• Find people with GPUs sitting idle, give them the standalone app
• Find people with GPU workloads (everyone using the tools from A), and give them your add-on that works with PyTorch/TensorFlow

OK, so a bunch of those steps are hard, but it's not hard to imagine, is it? Most of the software to do this stuff is out there for free -- it just needs to be plumbed together and the rough edges need to be smoothed out for the average user.

From either side as long as you can offer a turn key solution, you can ride the wave that is ML/AI, without doing too much work yourself.

GPUs and even the ML/AI run on them will eventually become commoditized -- running the marketplace that enables that commoditization is a great place to be.

Read my raw notes >

NOTE ML/AI isn't even really the only application for this -- there's a pivot in here as a remote render farm for Blender

What was in this week's uncut edition?

Like being teased? I hope so, because here's what was in the uncut edition this week:

Ideas:

• ██████████cloud█████everyone
• ████Interactive███████████Twitch
• GPU Compute Marketplace

Wrapup:

• Successful ideas are all over the place: Just pick one.

Don't forget, there's always money in the banana stand 3x more in the uncut edition.

Thanks for reading!

If you liked this letter feel free to criticize, comment on, remix, and share these ideas with your fellow builders and entrepreneurs!

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Check out the archive for access to editions that have been previously released.

Victor (victor@unvalidatedideas.com)