GPU Economics

“Immediately after that we’re going to have GPUs — we’re suspecting another three to five months for the GPUs to be ready.” — Greg Osuri, 01:19:58

“Absolutely. With the GPUs coming, all the Ethereum miners can run Akash on them and repurpose their hardware, and that’s a big bet we’re making actually. So we’re very excited for GPUs.” — Greg Osuri, 00:50:42

“Akash is a decentralized cloud infrastructure network, essentially a marketplace for cloud-grade compute — offers compute in an open, in a permissionless way, at a price point that’s market driven, usually anywhere from one-fifth to one-third to what you would pay on the market.” — Greg Osuri, 00:01:57

“GPUs — we are spec ready. We have about 20 customers that are ready to jump on with GPU… it’s a very complicated feature, especially doing generically schedulable GPUs. No one has done GPUs. Even the people that claim that they have GPUs — most GPUs are only used for mining, and that’s a completely different use case. So designing a general purpose GPU cloud is extremely challenging.” — Greg Osuri, 00:23:26

“Currently GPUs are very expensive on the cloud. We predict Akash’s GPUs to be anywhere from 20 to 50 percent lower than what the market offers — that’s an enormous cost savings for highly compute-intensive applications.” — Greg Osuri, 00:05:45

“As we all know, post-Merge, when it moves from proof of work to proof of stake, there’s going to be an enormous amount of GPU capacity that will be unutilized… the fact that we will be able to leverage GPUs on Akash very soon, it’s a great way for ETH miners to earn additional income on their existing capital.” — Greg Osuri, 00:05:02

“Us solving the GPU problem, especially by sourcing the underutilized GPUs of the Ethereum merge, is going to be a very important unique value proposition Akash can provide to the world.” — Greg Osuri, 00:32:09

“After that, we’ll be able to go to more niche use cases with computation heavy workloads — when we have GPUs — things like machine learning, things like heavy games that require a lot of GPUs, where we have an in-market advantage just from a cost perspective… when we offer GPUs, we are going with an amazing value proposition, which is cost saving instantly.” — Greg Osuri, 00:51:22

“In the next phase we’re going to be focused on data-intensive applications because it’s extremely expensive to run GPUs in the cloud… and especially by sourcing the underutilized GPUs of the Ethereum merge is going to be a very important unique value proposition Akash can provide to the world.” — Greg Osuri, 00:02:48

“That’s that Ethereum network in itself attracted, right, so 19 billion dollars of GPUs available means we should be able to be in a good position to leverage those GPUs onto Akash Network, thereby reducing the GPU cost on the cloud significantly. So we can’t really wait for the ETH merge to happen, and we’ll have the GPU capability by then.” — Greg Osuri, 00:11:28

“Phase three is to provide features that are unheard of in web2, like high performance computing with GPUs. We’ll be able to attract machine learning and really high performance computing 20 to 30 [percent] cheaper than the cloud, and that’s a big deal.” — Greg Osuri, 00:47:46

“GPUs are going to be a paradigm shift along with managed services — that’s going to take [Akash] to the next level.” — Greg Osuri, 00:54:54

“The problem we’re solving is improving efficiency of global computation, because our thesis is this enormous amount of unused compute out there… conservatively, over 85 percent of world’s compute is not used.” — Greg Osuri, 00:43:28

“There was a demo, a prototype, that kind of had functionality… it demonstrated that we can run a GPU workload… I can’t really give you a realistic timeline when this is going to come out, because whatever timeline I give you is going to be dependent on upstream Kubernetes to fix their stuff, but we’re making a lot of progress.” — Unknown, 00:00:44

“Akash as it stands today is the world’s first open market for unused capacity… where the benefit is really the first most visible benefit is the cost — I mean, Akash costs about 95% cheaper than your traditional Amazon, and the consumers of this compute interact with Akash in a fully non-custodial and fully permissionless way.” — Greg Osuri, 00:03:41

“GPUs are coming within the next three months, we’re very aggressively targeting.” — Greg Osuri, 00:12:05

“The potential outcome of a globally distributed GPU cluster is just cost reduction to a massive level, and repurposing existing hardware instead of trying to go build new hardware. With the supply chain shortages… if we don’t look inwards, we don’t try to reuse what we have… I think it’s going to be a failing endeavor.” — Greg Osuri, 00:06:32

“Our next mainnet’s focus is going to be high performance computing, so that means we’ll be coming out with GPUs… our goal is to launch a prototype or get it out by end of the year.” — Greg Osuri, 00:05:05

“This is the first instance an open market for IP addresses is ever launched, so I’m super excited for it… and fourth is discovery. Our next is going to be GPU, so we’re getting very, very close to GPUs.” — Greg Osuri, 00:02:52

“With GPUs we’ll start seeing superiority — that means for the first time you’ll see Akash deliver something the current cloud does not have, which is an open market for GPUs… we’re offering GPUs for 20 [percent] cheaper, and this ubiquitous amount of GPUs, all the way from… proof of work miners, after the merge, moving to proof of stake… having very powerful GPUs.” — Greg Osuri, 00:43:23

“A critical event that took Amazon to the next level is Netflix… similarly [for] Akash, the story is going to be one of the users… doing incredible things to get a competitive advantage over their competitors that are using the traditional cloud… then you’ll see exponential [growth]. I think we’re gonna see GPUs really deliver that Netflix for Akash.” — Greg Osuri, 00:45:30

“GPUs have been such an amazing resource that has always been constrained because of machine learning and AI… I think this text-to-image generation is going to unlock a new era of art and creativity, and this just needs a lot of compute. We as a society do not have enough GPUs to serve the needs of even immediate adoption for AI. So I’m super bullish on Akash supporting GPUs… giving a world where we have AI that’s much [more] affordable, much cheaper.” — Greg Osuri, 00:05:49

“There are about 19 billion dollars of GPUs that have been purchased and deployed for eth mining that’s just sitting idle… we are gearing up to have GPU support as soon as possible. I’m super excited to be able to unlock this GPU supply and offer it to the world at a significantly lower cost.” — Greg Osuri, 00:10:09

“The complexity of AI machines with all these amazing new applications is doubling every four months — that means the need for GPUs is doubling every four months… it’s impossible to even get an Nvidia A100 GPU chip right now. They’re selling double or maybe even triple the retail… $23,000 to $30,000, if you can get them.” — Greg Osuri, 00:09:26

“A protocol like Stable Diffusion, or a model — it costs about six hundred thousand dollars to get a basic training… with Akash we expect that to be, I don’t know, four hundred thousand dollars, 400 to 500,000 — still a lot of money saving. So HPC makes a lot of sense for us… there’s just enormous amounts of GPUs just sitting there idle.” — Greg Osuri, 00:34:57

“The need for GPUs is like doubling every four months and we are ready. About 19 billion dollars worth of GPUs are sitting dormant because of eth merge — that all needs to see the market, and Akash is ready to get into this. Don’t confuse GPUs for GPU mining — these GPUs are used for something useful, which is essentially AI.” — Greg Osuri, 00:58:56

“The complexity and the needs for compute is doubling every four months, especially generative AI… and there’s just not enough GPUs to support that growing. The only way to get these GPUs is to go inward… look at where the GPUs are deployed and try to get access to them, because people that have deployed, purchased GPUs are not willing to sell.” — Greg Osuri, 00:39:30

“This [is a] massive underserved market that’s struggling. I talked [to] people from big cloud providers to small ones… everybody is struggling to get GPUs. GPUs are still 5x price from their market… and Akash is the only way that can tap into unused GPU capacity… these are general purpose GPUs that allow you to run TensorFlow or machine learning applications — the first time an open platform can do that.” — Greg Osuri, 00:05:49

“We have enormous amount of GPUs that’s being unlocked from Ethereum mining, just enormous — about 19 billion dollars worth of GPUs. So Akash is very well positioned to capture that market and bring that demand back.” — Greg Osuri, 00:39:06

“Our biggest demand driver is going to be artificial intelligence, AI, because the complexity and the need for GPUs is doubling every four months and there’s just not enough GPUs around.” — Greg Osuri, 00:38:21

“So far Akash is just really trying to create a parity game… can we give capabilities of the current cloud provider… With GPUs we’ll start seeing superiority. That means for the first time you’ll see Akash deliver something the current cloud does not have, which is an open market for GPUs… offering GPUs for [way] cheaper and the ubiquitous amount of GPUs, all the way from miners… after the merge.” — Greg Osuri, 00:07:54

“A critical event that took Amazon to the next level is Netflix… that one story put Amazon on a different planet. Similarly, Akash — the story is going to be one of the users on Akash… doing incredible things to get a competitive advantage over their competitors that are using the traditional cloud, and those stories are going to get Akash… exponential. I think we’re gonna see GPUs really deliver that Netflix for Akash.” — Greg Osuri, 00:10:04

“There’s a tweet from a16z Andreessen Horowitz’s partner Martin Casado about the repatriation of the data center… there’s one case where he talks about a company saving up to a 40x, sorry, of the cloud bill by building a GPU kit in-house. It still doesn’t solve the underutilized problem — if that company is not using their hardware 100 [percent] of the time, they’re still losing money.” — Unknown, 00:02:10