I don't understand the economics of that, is it just because compute is very constrained and they are buying everything they can, even suboptimal machines with a lower performance per $?
Or is it just an experiment and anyway 10k macs are just a blip?
> According to The Information, OpenAI has reportedly purchased tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac Studios in recent months for reinforcement learning and training computer-use agents.
I do hope they verified this claim and didn't just read the headline. I'm not interested in subscribing to that source to find out unfortunately.
I hope this means OpenAI might become a contributor to Asahi Linux, lest their hardware investment become depreciated due to planned obsolecense by Apple.
Good luck with that. Managing zillions of Macs has always been difficult, clients and servers. Stanford tried to build an Xserve cluster and failed miserably at it because the OS wasn't conducive to it, nor the hardware at the time either. :( It's not impossible but requires a lot of messy custom, fragile tooling.. and that's expensive to support.
AI-junkie: Claude, please write an AI infra article about OpenAI buying Macs!
Please use a non-beige background for once!
AI-royalty: I'm sorry, non-beige requires the full token price!
I don't understand the economics of that, is it just because compute is very constrained and they are buying everything they can, even suboptimal machines with a lower performance per $? Or is it just an experiment and anyway 10k macs are just a blip?
The tinfoil hat answer is they want to ensure fewer people can run local LLMs instead of paying OpenAI for their models.
But the monthly subscription isn't that expensive?
(demon rises up. "muahahaha, you don't pay here with money")
Aren't they used doing this so they can generate training data for using Macs via the UI with computer use?
I think they just want Apple devices to train their computer-use models in a realistic environment.
What realistic environment requires 10,000 Macs?
10000 realistic encironments
I mean an agent probably only uses one mac at a time. But they're obviously training tons of agents concurrently.
Theyre distilling tge open models. Fr
Something else they want to price us out of?
Yep. Waiting for someone writing a paper titled "All you need is coffee" or something.
> According to The Information, OpenAI has reportedly purchased tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac Studios in recent months for reinforcement learning and training computer-use agents.
I do hope they verified this claim and didn't just read the headline. I'm not interested in subscribing to that source to find out unfortunately.
I hope this means OpenAI might become a contributor to Asahi Linux, lest their hardware investment become depreciated due to planned obsolecense by Apple.
A vibe coded distro is a real monkey's paw type of wish: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49499854
I highly doubt that a purchase this large did not come with contracts to get software working how OpenAI wants on the apple software hardware stack.
Apple wants this knowledge for their software stack too so it's not going out back into Asahi
The one good thing out of this, we may finally get the mac pro back. Hopefully a rackmount version that doesn't cost trillions.
Just to make sure we’re gonna do opening and run locally?
That went wrong.. I meant -> Just to make sure we won't be able to buy and run LLMs locally
Related:
Apple Caught Off Guard by AI Demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508982
Good luck with that. Managing zillions of Macs has always been difficult, clients and servers. Stanford tried to build an Xserve cluster and failed miserably at it because the OS wasn't conducive to it, nor the hardware at the time either. :( It's not impossible but requires a lot of messy custom, fragile tooling.. and that's expensive to support.
Sounds like a job for a state of the art model...
Chicken, meet egg.
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