Lots of AWS credits expiring soon, ideas?
Hey HN,
Long story short I have a lot (~$10K) of AWS credits expiring in a few months. Any ideas on the best way to make money / do some good with those? I can't directly sell them. Thanks!
Find a PhD student that needs GPUs for their research but isn’t in a first world institution. You could reach out to a few top professors and ask for a referral to someone promising.
Ie be a science benefactor
The suggestion of donating these concerns me.
IIUC these credits aren’t transferable so you’d have to set them up with access to an AWS sub account attached to your credit card. Last time I used AWS personally (it’s been a while) there was no way to limit spending in a subaccount.
Giving someone access to your account to burn through exactly $10k in credits where you are on the hook sounds… financially dangerous.
Am I missing something? Is there a way to make sure they only spend the $10k in credits and not a penny more?
Only $10k? Time to run a massively over engineered and over priced micro service based web server for like one month.
Usually needs dedicated servers, but you should be able to contribute if you use a beefy VM
I've been working on a project evaluating the Python and Javascripr programing performance of open-licensed large language models [1] but don't currently have the resources to run the larger 65B ones.
Any chance you'd be able to help run some evaluations?
[1] https://github.com/the-crypt-keeper/can-ai-code
If I had a thousand gallons of unusable gasoline that was going to expire in a few months, I would just be proud that I found a way to not expend it
My metaphor falls apart if those 10,000 dollars of AWS credits are all coming from green energy, though
Put an email in your bio so folks who need to get something done can contact you. Even if you cannot sell the credits directly, who says you cannot run something for someone else? Say, as a consulting contract.
If that’s too complicated, find some open source AI project that needs compute. RWKV. OpenAssistant, or something like that.
Like previously mentioned. Definitely give it to a PhD student *NOT* in the first world institution.
Maybe this is a bad use, but finding one of those really high-end AI voice suites and running off a bunch of audiobooks for books that never got narrated editions would be cool. Every time I get access to a better one I make a slightly improved version of "Sentenced to Prism."
Couple Ideas:
- build some sub accounts and run a hackathon for a local school/ kids non-profit
- reach out to some non-profits and see if they have any processing jobs that could be helpful (you'd be surprised!)
- train a weird CNN and open source the model (like one that can find wheres waldo, or something silly
- do some benchmarking (really hard to find good benchmark data)
- do some ML research
- Run a job for a small startup that might struggle with compute costs
- the PhD idea previously mentioned is fine, just don't send it out of North America, and don't do tier 1 universities... if your endowment is larger than the GDP of first world countries you can afford to give your PhD students some compute
best bet probably https://foldingathome.org/ unless there something specific you're interested in.
Ai being all the rage good budget to play around with some gpus
You might have enough to run up a few electron apps for a day or two. Maybe.
post your public key to github, the rest takes care of itself.
You can join an AWS partner, give them the credits in the exchange get virtual credits for a later consumption.
Donate it for learners. There's plenty of people doing certification. I'm sure a lot of them would like to do "hands on". If I were you I would go to places like examtopics and advertise. 100 of dollars would be enough, and it's easy to add subaccounts to AWS
Filter the CommonCrawl data for webmanifest file URLs and publish a concise URL index as a simple text file (on say GitHub).
We can use this to bootstrap a Progressive Web Apps (PWA) index webpage (also as a PWA) and give the platform app stores some competition!
CommonCrawl has an AWS Athena SQL query sample here: https://commoncrawl.org/2018/03/index-to-warc-files-and-urls...
We can filter by
content_mime_type STRING,
content_mime_detected STRING,
fields for the MIME type 'application/manifest+json'
If it's not against the terms, maybe you can sell it at a big discount?
I have the opposite problem, we have just finished a massive amount of AWS credits from our VC and unfortunately cannot stack these. Any advice on how to get more credits?
Head over to the elueuther.ai discord and discuss with some of the folks there. Tons of small experiments with LLMs can use the $10k in compute
Create a service which matches users with expiring credits to people who need compute at a discount. Spottier instances?
Tor relay or exit node until you find someone who could use the computing power better, like the PhD student as mentioned elsewhere (though I'd say any good idea that would get published can be worthy, don't need to sign with a university to do research as a hobby)
I work for a nonprofit that spends quite a bit on AWS. You could donate them and get a tax credit.
In Canada, gift cards aren’t allowed to expire any more. Is this equivalent at all?
Try to come up with the fastest way to burn through it and then make a YouTube video discussing how you did it. Preferably something both very clever and very stupid at the same time.
Host a kernel.org or Debian or gentoo or some other mirror for awhile. Talk to the maintainers first so they realize it'll be a "short term" mirror which they may not want to hassle with.
Contribute to open source LLM training. Any projects?
just wondering: could you buy instances with the full-upfront payment?
you'd not only get to spend the money, you'd also get a significant discount.
Easy, create your own saas, do a promotional services, put a time limit, there’re a lot of FOSS projects
Capture auth packets of as many neighbours' wifi networks as you can and crack them on a GPU :)
I'm a bit confused why nobody suggested cryptocurrency mining? not feasible?
Find some worthy open source projects and run mirrors/torrents for them?
we had same issue, at that time it was we will not hire few developers or pay the bill to big corp, we switch in 1-2 weeks to hetzner on dev and stg, and saved good amount of money.
Finetune an LLM for your own application.
make a REST API interface to the old fortune linux command. You could probably run it forever.
Download Common Crawl archive.
Train a new llm.. or btc mine
buy reserved ec2 or rds capacity
Train a model then burn it to the ground.
Fine tune a llm to make your mom jokes
comedy mine dodge coin option
Depending on the altruism level of yourself, you could do something like BOINC or just mine coins?