[ ] Yeah, I think your experiences are almost on a total different side of the spectrum from mine probably, only because right now I’m working with a non-profit, so… I think this is a good contrast. Obviously, the companies that you’ve worked for do have embedded AI research teams; maybe they invest in some of this NVIDIA hardware. But for me, doing machine learning and AI data-related work with a non-profit, I would basically be left out of every room I was in if I tried to get anyone to buy a 200k NVIDIA box.

I pretty much relied on everything in the cloud when I’ve needed it, and I think that wherever you fall on that spectrum for your AI team, there is a route forward… So it’s great if you’re able to afford that kind of dedicated hardware, and you have that commitment level within your organization, but maybe you’re not at that point yet, or you’re a startup trying to get into this space, or another organization that doesn’t have a huge AI team - you can do very similar things in the cloud.

Every cloud provider has instances that are available with specialized hardware, they also have a lot of services that will allow you to spin up clusters to do distributed computing, like Kubernetes clusters, and there’s frameworks on top of that that we can talk about in a bit… So I think wherever you fall on that spectrum, there is a route forward. But in either case you’re going to have some number of compute nodes on-premise or in the cloud that maybe some have just regular CPU’s, maybe some have GPU’s, and then you’re gonna have some storage that is storing the data that you’re working with for your training datasets, and that sort of thing.

Now let’s say that’s the base - so you’ve figured out whether you’re gonna be in the cloud or on-premise, whether you have dedicated hardware or you’re using the cloud stuff - what do AI people actually run on top of this compute and storage infrastructure?

Maybe let’s first think about “What do people run on this for model development and experimentation?” What’s your experience there, Chris? You mentioned notebook environments like Jupyter - do you run those off of your laptop? Do you have experience hosting those within your infrastructure for model development, or how does that work for you?