Machine learning devs, rejoice: You can now rent up to 16 Nvidia A100 GPUs on a single machine via Google

AI proto-boffins can now rent up to 16 GPUs, the largest amount on any single virtual machine currently available, via Google Cloud. "We are excited to announce the general availability of A2 VMs based on the NVIDIA Ampere A100 Tensor Core GPUs in Compute Engine," the company said. Devs can use the A2 VMs in various …

[Mage]

Although that may solve the privacy issue

How?

This is nonsense! And what use are they blurred?

It's WORSE. More people involved looking at probably illegally obtained face images!

The entire operation is immoral.

[Steve K]

Deepfakes

In this case, the deepfakes didn't look quite right (at least to me). They all seemed to have exactly the same expression and not quite matching the lighting conditions.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Deepfakes

I see the point about lighting, but the expression can't be relied on. Some people always do wear the same expression in photos.

[Christopher Reeve's Horse]

So that's where all the GPUs are...

I'm surprised even Google has the financial resources to find GPUs these days!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: So that's where all the GPUs are...

Probably renting them is the only way to get one today...

[Steve K]

Re: So that's where all the GPUs are...

What's the saying? If it flies or float(ing point)s then rent it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am leaving my camera off on any video calls now because who knows if it's being recorded and used a source material for deepfake.

You could use that to create online only bank accounts like starling which needs a short video to confirm id.

[David Roberts]

Blurred face?

Not sure how this soles the issue of posting pictures of naked children.

[Snowy]

Hmmm

I wonder how much bitcoin you could mine on that :)

[Michael Wojcik]

Catfishing?

The azusagakuyuki matter doesn't sound like catfishing to me, based on the description in the article, just bog-standard online impersonation -- something that became unremarkable many years ago, in my opinion. Catfishing is a particular species of fraud based on online impersonation. Here the only thing being "fraudulently" obtained by the perpetrator is attention, and the only thing lost by those supplying it are some trivial opportunity costs.

Men impersonating women in publication is much older than catfishing, of course. We're a few decades away from the Vicar and Virago, and that's just one notable modern instance.

The use of a GAN to alter the photos is a bit noteworthy (though only because it was being done by a private individual for personal satisfaction), but enough patience and GIMP or Photoshop would achieve the same effect.