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I wonder if Meta would ever try to compete with AWS / MSFT / GOOG for AI workloads
by DEDLINE 3y ago
I wonder if Meta would ever try to compete with AWS / MSFT / GOOG for AI workloads
- lifeisstillgood 3y agoFB does not have the flywheel of running data centres - all three of those mentioned run hyper scale datacentres that they can then juice by “investing” billions in AI companies who then turn around and put those billions as revenue in the investors OpenAI takes money from MSFT and buys Azure services Anthropic takes Amazon money and buys AWS services (as do many robotics etc) I am fairly sure it’s not illegal but it’s definitely low quality revenue
- woah 3y agoSounds like it's free equity at the very least
- lotsofpulp 3y agoHow is it free equity? Spending money to invest it somewhere involves risks. You might recover some of it if the investment is valued by others, but there is no guarantee.
- miohtama 3y agoYou do not need cash in hands to invest. Instead, you print your own money (AWS credit) and use that to drive up the valuation, because this money costs you nothing today. It might cost tomorrow though, when the company starts to use your services. However depending the deal structure they might not use all the credit, go belly up before credit is used or bought up by someone with real cash.
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- virtuallynathan 3y agoFacebook has more datacenter space and power than Amazon, Google, and Microsoft -- possibly more than Amazon and Microsoft combined...
- pgwhalen 3y agoI have zero evidence, but this seems extremely unlikely. Do you have more than zero evidence?
- meiraleal 3y agoMeta can use all their datacenter space while Amazon, Google, and Microsoft datacenter space is mostly rented.
- dsp 3y ago[citation needed]
- jedberg 3y agoUnless you've worked at Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, or a whole bunch of datacenter providers, I'm not sure how you could make that claim. They don't really share that information freely, even in their stock reports. Heck I worked at Amazon and even then I couldn't tell you the total datacenter space, they don't even share it internally.
- virtuallynathan 3y agoYou can just map them all... I have. I also worked at AWS :)
- chatmasta 3y agoThis would be an interesting dataset to use for trading decisions (or sell to hedge funds). But I wonder how much of their infrastructure is publicly mappable, compared to just the part of it that's exposed to the edge. (Can you map some internal instances in a VPC?) That said, I'm sure there are a lot of side channels in the provisioning APIs, certificate logs, and other metadata that could paint a decently accurate picture of cloud sizes. It might not cover everything but it'd be good enough to track and measure a gradual expansion of capacity.
- vineyardmike 3y agoNVidia also invests in their AI customers.
- fikama 3y agoWhat do you mean? Could you elaborate please? Enumerate some deals so I could read more about it?
- itslennysfault 3y agoNeither did AWS when they started. They were just building out data centers to run their little book website and decided to start selling the excess capacity. Meta could absolutely do the same, but in the short term, I think they find using that capacity more valuable than selling it.
- otterley 3y ago> Neither did AWS when they started. They were just building out data centers to run their little book website and decided to start selling the excess capacity. This is a myth. It simply isn't true. AWS was conceived as a greenfield business by its first CEO. Besides, S3 and SQS were the first AWS services; EC2 didn't appear till a few years later. And it wasn't built from excess Amazon server capacity; it was totally separate.
- miohtama 3y agoSuch barter deals were also popular during the 00s Internet Bubble. Here more on the deals (2003): https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/aol-saga-opens-old-dot-com-wounds/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/aol-saga-ope... Popular names included AOL, Cisco, Yahoo, etc. Not sure if Amazon’s term sheets driving high valuation are nothing but AWS credits (Amazon’s own license to print money).
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- rthnbgrredf 3y agoMeta could build their own cloud offering. But it would take years to match the current existing offerings of AWS, Azure and GCP in terms of scale and wide range of cloud solutions.
- bionhoward 3y agoaww, those existing offerings are overcomplicated as hell, a fresh look could yield substantially simpler cloud developer experience and this would compete well against those other cloud offerings on simplicity alone
- oblio 3y agoThe real question is: why aren't they? They had the infrastructure needed to seed a cloud offering 10 years ago. Heck, if Oracle managed to be in 5th (6th? 7th?) place, Facebook for sure could have been a top 5 contender, at least.
- KaiserPro 3y agobecause meta sucks at software, documentation and making sure end user products work in a supported way. Offering reliable IaaS is super hard and capital intensive. Its also not profitable if you are perceived as shit.
- logicchains 3y ago>because meta sucks at software Google started a cloud and their user-facing software is atrocious. Compared e.g. Angular to React, Tensorflow to Pytorch.
- negus 3y agoWhy would you prefer Pytorch to Tensorflow/Keras?
- chessgecko 3y ago
- crowcroft 3y agoI think Meta have avoided doing this because it would complicate their business priorities. They don’t really do B2B.
- carlossouza 3y agoWhat do you mean by “they don’t do B2B”? They sell ads to companies, don’t they?
- redleader55 3y agoFor consumers, AI could just be stateless "micro service". Meta already has enough surfaces where customers can interact with AI.