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There's some irony in the fact that this website reads as extremely NOT AI-generated, very human in the way it's designed and the tone of its writing.

Still, this is a great idea, and one I hope takes off. I think there's a good argument that the future of AI is in locally-trained models for everyone, rather than relying on a big company's own model.

One thought: The ability to conveniently get this onto a 240v circuit would be nice. Having to find two different 120v circuits to plug this into will be a pain for many folks.

I find that the most respected writing about AI has very few signs of being written by AI. I'm guessing that's because people in the space are very sensitive to the signs and signal vs. noise.
And because people writing anything worth reading are using the process of writing to form a proper argument and develop their ideas. It’s just not possible to do that by delegating even a small chunk of the work to AI.
I found it useful to preface with

* this section written by me typing on keyboard *

* this section produced by AI *

And usually both exist in document and lengthy communications. This gets what I wanted across with exactly my intention and then I can attach 10x length worth of AI appendix that would be helpful indexing and references.

> attach 10x length worth of AI appendix that would be helpful indexing and references.

Are references helpful when they're generated? The reader could've generated them themselves. References would be helpful if they were personal references of stuff you actually read and curated. The value then would be getting your taste. References from an AI may well be good-looking nonsense.

"The user could have written the code themselves"

Yes, sometimes this is true, but not always.

Note, it's not one prompt (there aren't really "one prompt" any more, prompt engineering is such a 2023-2024 thing), or purely unreviewed output. It's curated output that was created by AI but iterated with me since it goes with and has to match my intention. And most of the time I don't directly prompt the agent any more. I go through a layer of agent management that inject more context into the agent that actually work on it.

I agree wholeheartedly, I don’t see any balance in the effort someone dedicated to generating text vs me consuming it. If you feel there’s further insight to be gained by an llm, give me the prompt, not the output. Any communication channel reflects a balance of information content flowing and we are still adjusting to the proper etiquette.
Good? That's what I want out of all websites. I don't want to read what an AI believes is the best thing for a website, I want to know the honest truth.
I don't view this as irony. This seems like good sense in understanding when AI usage will make things better and when it will not.
I am a little surprised that they openly solicit code contributions with "Invest with your PRs" but don't have any statement on AI contributions.

Maybe the volume for them is ok that well-intentioned but poor quality PRs can be politely(or otherwise, culture depending) disregarded and the method of generation is not important.

Tinygrad sure shared a few opinions on AI PRs on Twitter. I believe the gist was "we have Claude code as well, if that's all you bring don't bother".
That's a pretty excellent take, IMO. Just an undirected AI model doesn't do much, especially when the core team has time with the code, domain expertise, _and_ Claude.
I'm starting to think that if you have an AI repo thats basically about codegen, you should just close all issues automatically, the manually (or whatever) open the ones you/maintainers actually care about. Thats about the only way to kill some of the signal/noise ratio AIs are creating.

Then you could focus fire, like the script kiddies did with DDoS in the old days on fixing whatever preferred issues you have.

If you’re spending $65,000 on this thing, needing two circuits seems like a minor problem
they could had gone with the Max-Q version RTX PRO 6000 and only require 120V circuit. 10% performance hit, but half the power.

fundamentally, looks like they are shipping consumer off-the-shelf hardwares in a custom box.

Yeah, the other big benefit is that the Max-Q's have blowers that exhaust the hot air out of the box, the workstation cards would each blow their exhaust straight into the intake of the card behind it. The last card in that chain would be cooking, as the air has already been heated up by 1800W, essentially a hair dryer on high.

Or could be the server edition 6000s that just have a heatsink and rely on the case to drive air through them, those are 600W cards.

The $12,000 one also requires it.
Easier to get two circuits than rewire a breaker in an office you might be renting, no?

(I work for an electrical contractor so my sense of ease might be overcorrecting)

And 240v is orders of magnitude more common worldwide than 120v
Surprisingly affordable but I’m not really interested in the 9070XT.

If it shipped with like 4090+ (for a higher price) it’d be more tempting.

They offered a version a few months ago with 4x5090 for 25k

https://x.com/__tinygrad__/status/1983917797781426511

Stopped due to raising GPU prices:

https://x.com/__tinygrad__/status/2011263292753526978

9070XT provide roughly same inference performance at double the power, half the cost, as RTX PRO 4500. So this one is optimized for total BOM cost.
The specs show that it only has one PSU. The docs just say that it has 2 and thus needs two circuits, but I’d guess that was meant to be for the more expensive one.
"locally-trained models for everyone"

Wouldn't there be a massive duplication of effort in that case? It'll be interesting to see how the costs play out. There are security benefits to think about as well in keeping things local-first.

There are multiple efforts for 'folding at home' but for AI models at this point. I get the impression that we will see a frontier model released this year built on a system like this.
If I'm spending at least 12k USD on the machine then doing some electrical works to accommodate it is not a big deal.
When you’re dealing with this kind of power it’s easier just to colocate where you’ll typically get two separate feeds of 208v
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A typical U.S. 240V circuit is actually just two 120V circuits. Fairly trivial to rewire for that.
It's more accurate to say that the typical 120V circuit is just a 240V source with the neutral tapped into the midpoint of the transformer winding.
This. It definitely comes in at a higher voltage.
Sort of? It’s 120V RMS to ground.
yes, this is accurate for US and “works” but it’s against code here. you’ll get mildly shocked by metallic cabinets and fixtures especially if you’re barefoot and become the new shortest path to ground.

old construction in the US sometimes did this intentionally (so old, the house didn’t have grounds. Or to “pass” an inspection and sell a place) but if a licensed electrician sees this they have to fix it.

I’m dealing with a 75 year old house that’s set up this way, the primary issue this is causing is that a 50amp circuit for their HVACs are taking a shorter path to ground inside the house instead of in the panel.

As a result the 50 amp circuit has blown through several of the common 20amp grounds and neutrals and left them with dead light fixtures and outlets because they’re bridged all over the place.

If an HVAC or two does this, I’d advise against this for your 3200 watt AI rig.

EU, you don’t want to try to energize your ground. They use step down transformers or power supplies capable of taking 115-250 (their systems are 240-250V across the load and neutral lines. Not 120 across the load and neutral like ours.)

in the US. you’re talking about energizing your ground plane with 120v and I don’t want to call that safe… but it’s REALLY NOT SAFE to make yourself the shortest path to ground on say. a wet bathroom floor. with 220V-250v.

loading story #47478469
Yes, if you have a 240V US split-phase circuit you could make a little sub-panel with a 40A breaker feeding two 20A 120V circuits and plug the two power supplies into each side. (1600W would need a 20-A breaker because 13.3A would be too much of a 15A circuit). But it would probably make more sense to just plug them both into the same 40A 240V circuit. If you use NEMA 6-20, make sure you label it appropriately and probably color it red.

In Europe, you could plug the two power supplies into an appropriately sized 240V circuit.

In an apartment you can't rewire, you could set it up in your kitchen, which in the modern US code should have two separate 20A circuits. You will need to put it to sleep while you use appliances.

A US circuit is.

But this is re: European 240/250 which is 240 between its load and neutral

I’d say don’t energize either systems ground plane, but , really, don’t do this in EU

I think you're forgetting the wires? If you have one outlet with a 15-20A 120V circuit, then the wiring is almost certainly rated for 15-20A. If you just "combined" two 120V circuits into a 240V circuit, you still need an outlet that is rated for 30A, the wires leading to it also need to be rated for 30A, and it definitely needs a neutral. So you still need a new wire run if you don't have two 120V circuits right where you wanna plug in the box. To pass code you also may need to upsize conduit. If load is continuously near peak, it should be 50A instead of 30.

So basically you need a brand new circuit run if you don't have two 120V circuits next to each other. But if you're spending $65k on a single machine, an extra grand for an electrician to run conduit should be peanuts. While you're at it I would def add a whole-home GFCI, lightning/EMI arrestor, and a UPS at the outlet, so one big shock doesn't send $65k down the toilet.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but doubling the volts doesn't change the amps, it doubles the watts. Watts = V*A.
Yes; I assumed 30A was minimum requirement for 240V service in US. Apparently I was wrong, 20A 240V is apparently normal. So in theory you could use a pre-existing 20A 120V circuit's wiring for a 240V (assuming it was 12/3 cable). And apparently 4-wire is now the standard for 240V service in US? Jesus we have a weird grid.
Doubling the volts halves the amps. P = I * V indeed.
I think you might've misread GP. (Or maybe I did?)

He's not saying you would use it as two separate 120v circuits sharing a ground but rather as a single 240v circuit. His point is that it's easy to rewire for 240v since it's the same as all the other wiring in your house just with both poles exposed.

Of course you do have to run a new wire rather than repurpose what's already in the wall since you need the entire circuit to yourself. So I think it's not as trivial as he's making out.

But then at that wattage you'll also want to punch an exhaust fan in for waste heat so it's not like you won't already be making some modifications.

The wiring (at least in the US) to the 120V outlets is just one half of the split-phase 240V. If you want to send 240V down a particular wire, you can do that, by changing the breaker, but then you lose the neutral. You also make the wires dangerous to people who don't realize that the white wire is now energized at 120V over ground. (Though it's best to test to be sure anyway, as polarity gets reversed by accident, etc.) Live wires should be black or red.
I’ve actually had half of my dryer outlet fail when half of the breaker failed.

Can confirm.

Sometimes. 240V circuits may or may not have a neutral.
If you actually use two 120V circuits that way and one breaker flips the other half will send 120V through the load back into the other circuit. So while that circuit's breaker is flipped it is still live. Very bad. Much better to use a 240V breaker that picks up two rails in the panel.
They make connected circuit breakers for this use case, where one tripping automatically trips both.
I assume the device has two separate PSUs, each of which accepts 120-240V, and neither of which will backfeed its supply.
i am guessing, without any proof, that, when one breaker fails the server lose it all, or loose two GPUs, depending on whether one connected to the cpu side failed.
GPUs aren't electrically isolated from the motherboard though. An entire computer is a single unified power domain.

The only place where there's isolation is stuff like USB ports to avoid dangerous ground loop currents.

That said I believe the PSU itself provides full isolation and won't backfeed so using two on separate circuits should (maybe?) be safe. Although if one circuit tripped the other PSU would immediately be way over capacity. Hopefully that doesn't cause an extended brownout before the second one disables itself.

3200W at ~240V is ~15A, that's just a regular household socket, at least in Europe. I imagine 240V sockets in the US are at least 15A.

No need for separate circuits, just use a double adapter.

Why is hn so obsessed Scott whether something is _written_ by ai or not? Who cares? Judge content, not form.

Oh wait, I get it, it's bike shedding.

I've been seeing variations on your comment a lot on HN lately and I find it a rather vapid way of looking at something so intricate as human communication. Among other things, the medium is the message!
Big companies are pushing cloud really hard, and yea the hardware prices too is a problem. People still buy Google cloud and OneDrive when they could literally pickup an old computer from trash and Frankenstein it into a NAS server.