Comment by ActorNightly
3 hours ago
>At scale (like comma.ai), it's probably cheaper. But until then it's a long term cost optimization with really high upfront capital expenditure and risk.
The issue with comma.ai is that the company is HEAVILY burdened with Geohotz ideals, despite him no longer even being on the board. I used to be very much into his streams and he rants about it plenty. A large reason of why they run their own datacenter is that they ideologically refuse to give money to AWS or Google (but I guess Microsoft passes their non woke test).
Which is quite hilarious to me because they live in a very "woke" state and complain about power costs in the blog post. They could easily move to Wyoming or Montana and with low humidity and colder air in the winter run their servers more optimally.
Our preference for training in our own datacenter has nothing to do with wokeness. Did you read the blog post? The reasons are clearly explained.
The climate in Wyoming and Montana are actually worse in terms of climate. San Diego's climate extremes are less extreme than those places. Though moving out of CA is a good idea for power cost reasons, also addressed in the blog.