That’s around ~$4-6 million in hardware cost (one rack, 72 GPUs + accompanying hardware).
Many AI shops are funded well into tens of millions if not hundreds, for early rounds.
Also the team size is really small (< 10???). So yes, indie might be a stretch but still very impressive, relatively speaking.
Now taking the other side, they didn’t have to worry about hosting/billing/subscriptions or any of that yet. It’s a research demo at this point.
that’s a good clarification, skimming some of the comments here I was thinking they trained it on a single GB200 gpu. THAT would be a huge win for indie AI
Edit: Nvidia GB200 does not refer to a single gpu, Nvidia’s naming scheme is very confusing. Considering past gpus were called H100, H200 etc, I thought GB200 would just be a newer GPU, but it does actually refer to their 30+ gpu rack scale systems. The claim of “we trained this on a single rack of gpus” is definitely much less impressive than “we trained this on a single gpu”
It's even more confusing than that :)
GB200 = 1 CPU + 2 B200 GPUs (packaged together)
NV72 = A rack of 72 B200 GPUs (or 32 GB200 superchips)
Think of GB200 as something like Apple's 'Ultra' chip. Not exactly, but similar. They fuse the chips together with a very fast interconnect (connection).Or marketing, which they kinda get for free. So much research goes unseen, there’s huge competition for attention, and most research is very limited in that regard
I would say that’s the biggest factor that makes the team “not indie”
At the same time, like you said, still amazing accomplishment, very cool model, and great work
[0]: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/gb200-nvl72/
[1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...