[HN Gopher] OpenAI Selects Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to Extend...
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OpenAI Selects Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to Extend Microsoft
Azure AI Platform
Author : tosh
Score : 45 points
Date : 2024-06-11 20:40 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.oracle.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.oracle.com)
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Maybe we can just start referring to them as the "Axis of Evil"
| or the "Unholy triumvirate".
| Someone1234 wrote:
| Oracle Cloud is a bad product and I wouldn't recommend. I'm
| guessing Oracle practically gifted OpenAI compute to make this
| possible and that this announcement is the whole purpose (i.e.
| "look at us, we're equal to AWS/Azure!!! OpenAI runs here!!!").
|
| Oracle and Google Cloud have been doing this stuff _constantly_.
| mikeocool wrote:
| Given that Microsoft and Google are already giving away huge
| amounts of compute to AI companies, Oracle must be outright
| paying them to do this.
| crowcroft wrote:
| I've found Oracle's free tier quite generous. I guess OpenAI
| does as well.
| cjk2 wrote:
| It's sort of like a crack dealer's free tier. You know it's
| going to end miserably but you just can't help yourself.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| Not necessarily, use it for testing only (not production)
| and you will be fine.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| I run a little kube cluster on it that serves as the
| brain for my home lab on it and it's been cranking along
| just fine for the better part of half a year. It's all
| IaC and ephemeral so if it died tomorrow I could just
| restart it. Quite generous for $0
| ls612 wrote:
| Can you feasibly run a homelab C&C server on the free
| tier of any of the big 3?
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| It's possible to run a single node cluster on GCP for
| almost free, especially if you're creative with spot
| instance. But afaik, not really otherwise. OCI is far and
| away more generous, giving you 4 dedicated always on
| nodes, which is just enough to run a decent mini cluster
| delecti wrote:
| I know you're talking about the cloud offerings, but the
| idea of using just a little bit of crack as "not
| production" is hilarious to me.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _a crack dealer 's free tier_
|
| Pretty sure GCP & AWS employ a _lot_ of ex-Oracle people.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I also have a couple of ARM servers there, nothing fancy.
| The internal networks and machine are extremely snappy for
| what they provide. Even the containers I threw in run
| great.
|
| If you need small needs, it's a good provider. The
| dashboard is very convoluted, though.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Yeah, I use their free tier. At $0 it's the best offering.
| But I end up with racknerd for just raw Linux machine that I
| manage myself with `iptables` and friends.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I'm guessing the free tier available to OAI is not the same
| free tier available to anyone else.
| bn-l wrote:
| I've heard of people being cut off without warning on the
| free tier.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| Yes. Not only are there bad actors, but oracle aggressively
| culls underutilized instances. If you sign up and attach
| your billing info you won't get that happening to you. I
| know, it sounds silly, but once I did that I had no issues.
| It's difficult to even get instances provisioned if you
| don't do that, it's really only possible by having a script
| that runs and continually retries/requests instances. I've
| had my billing info tied to it and never had an issue with
| being charged the entire half year I've been using it.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _" look at us, we're equal to AWS/Azure!!! OpenAI runs
| here!!!"_
|
| Possible, as they have lost deals even in countries where they
| enjoy MFN: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/oracle-
| ceo-confus... / https://archive.is/zO35B
| qudat wrote:
| We run https://pico.sh on their free tier, can't complain about
| our experience.
| cjk2 wrote:
| Oracle evil - check. Microsoft privacy violating mess - check.
| Azure rolling disaster zone - check.
|
| What could possibly go wrong?
| smkelly wrote:
| Oracle lawyers, ever waiting to pounce on new prey, extend their
| claws.
| rcv wrote:
| Oracle lawyers- Tucking their pencils away- Extend their sharp
| claws
| dehugger wrote:
| God speed, OCI is a pile of garbage. Once had them delete every
| single one of our production servers in the middle of the work
| day (in the hundreds of instances) due to an uncaught billing
| error.
|
| Triage took over 3 three days and there was a significant amount
| of lost customer data and financial impact.
|
| I wouldn't recommend OCI if they were the last cloud provider on
| earth.
| behnamoh wrote:
| Lots of negative comments about Oracle. If they're so bad, how
| come PMs and higher ups keep choosing them? Is there no
| resistance voice from engineers?
|
| Edit: I'm getting downvoted by engineers. I guess they have to
| vent somehow... How about take your downvote to the PM who's
| going to sign a new Oracle contract?
| cjk2 wrote:
| From experience working with these people for many years, it is
| mostly because they are fuckwits. No joke. Literally no
| objectivity or capability to reason about logically. The first
| vendor that gets in the door and shows them a shiny turd and
| they sign a contract which is difficult to get out of.
|
| Anyone who is technical in those orgs is either very junior and
| stepped straight in a cow shit out of college, has a pension
| they are counting down to or is so utterly disinterested that
| they don't give a shit about anything other than the coffee
| break or the end of the day.
|
| My capacity in those orgs was the overpaid consultant who came
| in, looked at what they were doing and told them they were
| stupid in a huge word document and then leave with a pocket
| full of cash with no changes ever being made.
| causalmodels wrote:
| A good sales person on a golf course with a VP can do a lot of
| damage
| dylan604 wrote:
| s/golf course/[strip club|ski/beach resort|yacht vacay]/ as
| suits the particular VP
| numbsafari wrote:
| You think that voice carries more weight than a golf junket?
| 7thpower wrote:
| Oracle is in the business of selling career insurance for
| executives.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| I think it is because they are significantly cheaper than the
| alternatives.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Oracle? Oracle is the most expensive at everything.
|
| There were consultants specializing in optimizing Oracle
| bills way before they existed for AWS.
| threeseed wrote:
| Used to work at Oracle. They keep winning deals because at the
| C-level it's about:
|
| - enterprise-grade features
|
| - completeness of vision
|
| - long term viability
|
| - dependable support
|
| - availability of talent
|
| And no, normally they don't want to hear from engineers.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Believe somewhere in the analysis of these million-dollar
| deals, we missed one Harvard classmate doing a solid to
| another.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I was once apart of a team evaluating storage solutions from
| multiple vendors. We had rows of racks dedicated to each
| vendor. Between production IT, production engineers, and even
| the operators doing the daily grind, there was a clear loser
| and 2 very good/close winners. We ran our stress tests for
| months to generate all sorts of useful metrics. Then,
| corporate comes along and makes a massive PR release about
| the new deal they just signed with the absolute worst vendor.
|
| Eventually, after production came to a grinding halt because
| the storage solution did not work, there was no follow up PR
| campaign about the abject failure of that partnership.
| C-suite people can fuck up the easiest decisions because of
| perks/kick backs.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| But OCI falls down on essentially _all_ that stuff vs AWS or
| even GCP.
|
| OCI is cheap; that's the USP.
| rodgerd wrote:
| Selling into the enterprise is about doing your research on who
| the key people are, who has the purse strings, what the drivers
| for that company are, and what your competitors are doing with
| pricing, bundling, and their pitches.
|
| Very little of this involves talking to code monkeys, unless
| there's a technical person who is already well-regarded enough
| that general managers, C*O, and the like, listen to their
| opinions.
|
| The engineers in the company are usually sufficiently
| contemptuous of "politics" and "people pleasing" and "bean
| counters" and "marketing" that they aren't part of those
| discussions, because they've already made it clear that they
| hold the people making the calls in contempt. Oracle sales
| people are more than happy to fill the gap.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| The amount of shit software my org has bought with seemingly no
| technical people in the meetings in mindboggling. For some
| reason the MO seems to be to bring the tech people in after the
| purchase to 'integrate'. Maybe because managers know the
| technical people would object and they just want to buy a
| solution now so it seems they are worth the inflated salary.
| michaelt wrote:
| Oracle's database is actually pretty good, if price is no
| object and you've got a team of competent DBAs looking after
| it, who'll lock you out of most of the footguns. Particularly a
| few decades ago, when MySQL's query planning was very basic.
|
| And sure, once you're locked in they'll jack the price up more
| and more every year - or worse, your business will grow and the
| bosses will try to control costs by not licensing more CPUs.
| But it's not your money, and you can always just go work
| somewhere else, whereupon the vendor lock-in isn't your
| problem.
| crowcroft wrote:
| Does Apple still have a close relationship with Oracle? I wonder
| if this is related.
| 7thpower wrote:
| So, I guess OpenAI really is evil.
| colinrand wrote:
| This is super sketch for others on the platform. First hand
| experience from using OCI - they have severe capacity constraints
| and need _lots_ of heads up when you want to increase your usage
| of things. Auto scaling it ain't.
|
| So if OpenAI starts drawing significant resources from their
| cloud hardware, good luck gettin your own. Including me :)
| pubg wrote:
| Lots of shade being thrown, I'm surprised at all the toxic bile.
| All cloud providers are fundamentally in a race to the bottom for
| commoditization of compute infrastructure. The competition should
| be desirable.
|
| Anyhow, if I had to guess why ClosedAI made this decision, well
| there are lots of big companies who like Oracle Cloud because if
| the spend is sufficient, Oracle will literally build and then
| support whatever configurations you want in any region across the
| entire globe. Good luck getting that level of care from AWS,
| Azure, or Goggle.
|
| In my experience OCI is still better than GCP, not that it's
| really saying much, AWS has been the "best" IME :)
|
| Clouds can't love you back.
| tuckerconnelly wrote:
| What are your gripes with GCP? I've been using it for every
| project for a while, and am super happy with it, especially
| GKE.
| pubg wrote:
| Maybe you weren't burned by the near periodic massive GCP
| outages from 2019 - 2023. More power to you, but I'm not
| signing up for more of that.
| bavell wrote:
| 6+ years on GCP across half a dozen kubernetes clusters here...
| very little to complain about IME. Have fun with Oracle.
| jwildeboer wrote:
| Big AI is just the same old boys club that governed IT since the
| 1980s, it seems.
| pojzon wrote:
| If we ever get skynet from it - never expected less from Oracle
| EvilCorp Co.
| bastard_op wrote:
| At this point it's only a matter of who's got those damn gpu's
| and enough of them, or not, willing to deal with, eww, Oracle
| even. Since already in bed with Microsoft, why serve a lesser
| evil - upgrade to Oracle.
| virtuosarmo wrote:
| On their conference call tonight, Larry Ellison indicated Oracle
| will be building a dedicated data center for OpenAI to use for
| training, with 1 GW of power, and its own power plant and DLC.
| Stocked with newest NVIDIA chips.
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(page generated 2024-06-11 23:01 UTC)