alt Hacker NewsIs it cheaper to rerun it?
> The verifier runs on the client's CPU. It needs no GPU and only has access to a commitment to the weights. The client downloads the commitment, ~6.5 MB in all, and then one proof per request. Checking a proof takes 17 seconds on 24 threads (and 21 seconds on a single thread), including the offline phase's checks.
As a client that sounds like it might be much cheaper to verify than reprocessing.
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nemo1618 • yesterday at 8:14 PM
Since it's CPU vs GPU, it's not apples-to-apples. But in terms of wall-clock time, one inference pass is surely faster than 17 seconds. Plus there's the proof generation step, which the post describes as ~100x slower than generating the response itself.
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As a client, you're still paying for the compute even if it happens on the service provider's side. Running the same computation twice (perhaps by another provider) is 2x the cost; but if you ask the provider to make this proof, that increases the cost 70-95 times according to the article.
With that level of overhead, all kinds of otherwise inefficient approaches of getting compute start to seem comparably cheap. This is progress, but it still needs like a hundredfold improvement in order to become practical; I don't see a usecase where the benefits of this proof would be worth 70x or even 7x increase in cost.