Short answer: Ben Lerner says Espresso investor Daniel Gross leads part of Meta's effort; his fund's Andromeda cluster bought $100 million in GPUs for portfolio companies in 2023. Ben suspects Meta will keep the compute internal.
Watch this answer from Episode 27 (starts at 20:23) · Episode 27 notes and transcript
From Episode 27: We Let AI Control Our Data Warehouse — The Results Were SHOCKING, starting at 20:23.
Jordan Metzner [20:23]: Okay. Cool. Let's jump into the other story, which I think is like pretty interesting, which is about Facebook's announcement about this megawatt capacity. And I think, I've been saying for a while it seems obvious that they should kind of do the AWS thing and like offer some of their GPUs as a service. I think what's like most interesting about this is the way they finance this thing, because it shows like an ability for Facebook to kind of scale these things without having to leverage their balance sheet, and that obviously can, provide for even more scale. But, yeah, obviously, we've seen the mega salaries they've done. We've seen the Scale AI acquisition, etcetera. But, I would love to hear your thoughts about Facebook and building their own kind of mega compute, and whether they make it available or not. Still is not clear yet, but seems like it will be.
Ben Lerner [21:09]: Yeah. It is. It would be interesting to have another hyperscaler competing. I think that, like, Google has really phenomenal technology. In a way, like, sales is really, like, a core part of that, and being late to the race is really difficult, which is definitely something that GCP learned. Maybe, like, really focusing on GPUs is a way to get into the market now, like CoreWeave IPO recently. So there's definitely more more room there. Generally so the in this article, the person leading up part of this effort is Daniel Gross. He's an investor of ours and was part of the big, like, meta acquisition. And interestingly, like, the way that we connected with him is in 2023, his fund announced the Andromeda cluster, which was a, small purchase of a $100,000,000 in GPUs to make available to their portfolio companies. And there was, like at the time, there's just, no GPU anywhere. Like, it was if you were not committing to, millions of dollars in spend, which as a start up, we definitely couldn't, He just like, we ended up, like, buying GPUs off Amazon, basically, and, like, just running them in our office. So, like, I think that this is, like, an awesome project that is totally up his alley and something that he has a lot of experience in. So, like, really excited to see where it goes. The overall, like, should like, yeah, like, the meta huge salaries thing is kind of like Mark Zuckerberg seems to take really big bets, and, some of them play out and some of them don't.
Ben Lerner [22:45]: I think that given how important ML is, like, it's not crazy. I probably no one would have done it. Like, no one else would have maybe done it exactly in this way, but the idea of, like, we have all this money. How do we give ourselves a shot at being a at the leader in the AI race, especially when, they're not OpenAI and they're not Google and maybe haven't been doing quite that much research into LLM specifically is, like, it's it's it's fun to watch. And I like, it's it's interesting to see what comes out of there. I'd also be, like, excited to have, like, more GPU availability and, like, hopefully, cheaper and better availability. But, honestly, I kinda suspect they'll set it all up internally. The flip side is maybe, like, if they haven't gone onto the market as a, cloud provider, like, why would they do it now? But who knows? Like, Zuck could wake up one day and decide that's what they're doing, and then that's that's what they'll do.
Jordan Metzner [23:42]: Yeah. I definitely agree with many of your points. I mean, if it seems like historically to date that, ads or, AI and ads are AI is one of the best use case or ads are one the best use case for AI, etcetera. So, yeah, obviously, I mean, a business built on advertising, like Facebook and Google both, obviously perform well using AI. Yeah. We'll see as, NVIDIA brings on, TPUs with its Groq acquisition and the impact on, all these types of chips at the inference level. And to your point, like, yeah, Zuck is willing to take a lot of risk and make some bets, and, it'll be exciting to see what happens there.
