alt Hacker NewsI think there's a market for a home AI server that can run an LLM or video gen model behind a web frontend. Not literally a raspberry pi strapped to an H100, but something with lopsided enough specs that people joke it is.
And precisely because it's such a huge headache to do yourself, I think a small company could make a nice business wrapping up used datacenter cards in that sort of server.
Replies
Bombthecat • today at 1:08 AM
Meh
Models are too big now
I'm doubtful they can, based on current inference prices. An H100 draws about 50W while idling, which is ~$8/month at average US electricity prices. They also draw ~400W while active.
The electricity prices are relevant because if you paid $0 for your H100 and didn't use it a single time, you could buy millions of tokens in inference just on the electricity it draws while idling. If you can't keep that thing saturated through the night, you're probably underwater overnight. Likewise, it's too small to run even the frontier open source models so you need to be able to live with worse models.
Max power matters because you aren't going to run many of those H100s before you blow breakers in most houses. Newer houses in the US are 15A service to non-kitchen breakers, so 1650W (that might be peak rather than continuous, not sure). If you're plugging that into an existing run, you could maybe run 2 before you start blowing breakers? You can't just plug 4 H100s into the wall in a normal house.
Maybe I'm wrong, though. I'd be curious, it'd be neat to run my own inference for something more than what'll run on a 3080.