Just Compute: an idea for a highly scalable AI nonprofit
Just Compute is a 501c3 organization whose mission is to buy cutting-edge chips and distribute them to academic researchers and nonprofits doing research for societal benefit. Researchers can apply to Just Compute to get access to the JC cluster, which supports research in AI safety, AI for good, AI for science, AI ethics, and the like, through a transparent and streamlined process. It’s a lean nonprofit organization with a highly ambitious founder who seeks to raise billions of dollars for compute.
The case for Just Compute is fairly robust: it supports socially valuable AI research and creates opportunities for good researchers to work in AI for social benefit and without having to join a scaling lab. And because frontier capabilities are compute constrained, it also slows down the frontier by using up a portion of the total available compute. The sales case for it is very strong, as it attracts a wide variety of donors interested in supporting AI research in the academy and at nonprofits. Donors can even earmark their donations for specific areas of research, if they’d like, perhaps with a portion of the donations mandatorily allocated to whatever JC sees as the most important area of AI research.
If a pair of co-founders wanted to launch this project, I think it could be a very cool moonshot!
Why does it make sense to bundle buying chips, operating a datacenter etc. with doing due diligence on grant applicants? Why should grant applicants prefer to receive compute credits from your captive neocloud than USD they can spend on any cloud they want—or on non-compute, if the need there is greater?
You might believe future GPU hours are currently underpriced (e.g. maybe we’ll soon develop AI systems that can automate valuable scientific research). In such a scenario, GPU hours would become much more valuable, while standard compute credits (which iiuc are essentially just money designated for computing resources) would not increase in value. Buying the underlying asset directly might be a straightforward way to invest in GPU hours now before their value increases dramatically.
Maybe there are cleverer ways to bet on price of GPU hours dramatically increasing that are conceptually simpler than nvidia share prices increasing, idk.
You’re probably right that operating a data center doesn’t make sense. The initial things that pushed me in that direction were concerns about robustness of the availability of compute and the aim to cut into the supply of frontier chips labs have available to them rather than funge out other cloud compute users, but it’s likely way too much overhead.
I don’t worry about academics preferring to spend on other things, it’s specialization for efficient administration and a clear marketing narrative.
Just Compute: an idea for a highly scalable AI nonprofit
Just Compute is a 501c3 organization whose mission is to buy cutting-edge chips and distribute them to academic researchers and nonprofits doing research for societal benefit. Researchers can apply to Just Compute to get access to the JC cluster, which supports research in AI safety, AI for good, AI for science, AI ethics, and the like, through a transparent and streamlined process. It’s a lean nonprofit organization with a highly ambitious founder who seeks to raise billions of dollars for compute.
The case for Just Compute is fairly robust: it supports socially valuable AI research and creates opportunities for good researchers to work in AI for social benefit and without having to join a scaling lab. And because frontier capabilities are compute constrained, it also slows down the frontier by using up a portion of the total available compute. The sales case for it is very strong, as it attracts a wide variety of donors interested in supporting AI research in the academy and at nonprofits. Donors can even earmark their donations for specific areas of research, if they’d like, perhaps with a portion of the donations mandatorily allocated to whatever JC sees as the most important area of AI research.
If a pair of co-founders wanted to launch this project, I think it could be a very cool moonshot!
Why does it make sense to bundle buying chips, operating a datacenter etc. with doing due diligence on grant applicants? Why should grant applicants prefer to receive compute credits from your captive neocloud than USD they can spend on any cloud they want—or on non-compute, if the need there is greater?
You might believe future GPU hours are currently underpriced (e.g. maybe we’ll soon develop AI systems that can automate valuable scientific research). In such a scenario, GPU hours would become much more valuable, while standard compute credits (which iiuc are essentially just money designated for computing resources) would not increase in value. Buying the underlying asset directly might be a straightforward way to invest in GPU hours now before their value increases dramatically.
Maybe there are cleverer ways to bet on price of GPU hours dramatically increasing that are conceptually simpler than nvidia share prices increasing, idk.
You’re probably right that operating a data center doesn’t make sense. The initial things that pushed me in that direction were concerns about robustness of the availability of compute and the aim to cut into the supply of frontier chips labs have available to them rather than funge out other cloud compute users, but it’s likely way too much overhead.
I don’t worry about academics preferring to spend on other things, it’s specialization for efficient administration and a clear marketing narrative.
One problem is that donors would rather support their favorite research than a mixture that includes non-favorite research.
Most major donors don’t have time or expertise to vet research opportunities, so they’d rather outsource to someone else who can source and vet them.
I’m not sure if others share this intuition, but most of this gives off AI-generated vibes fyi