TL;DR: A laptop that is just a remote desktop ( + why this didn’t work before and how to fix that)
Why this is nice for AI Security:
Reduces the amount of GPUs that will be sent to customers
Somewhat better security for this laptop since it’s a bit more like defending a cloud computer. Maybe labs would use this to make the employee computers more secure?
Network spikes: A reason this didn’t work before and how to solve it
The problem: Sometimes the network will be slow for a few seconds. It’s really annoying if this lag also affects things like they keyboard and mouse, which is one reason it’s less fun to work with a remote desktop
Proposed solution: Get multiple network connections to work at the same time:
Specifically, have many network cards (both WIFI and SIM) in the laptop, and use MPTCP to utilize them all.
Also, the bandwidth needed (to the physical laptop) is capped at something like “streaming a video of your screen” (Claude estimates this as 10-20 Mbps if I was gaming), which would probably be easy to get reliable given multiple network connections. Even if the the user is downloading a huge file, the file is actually being downloaded into the remote computer in the data center, enjoying way faster internet connection than a laptop would have.
Why this is nice for customers
Users of the computer can “feel like” they have multiple GPUs connected to their laptop, maybe autoscaling, and with a way better UI than ssh
The laptop can be light, cheap, and have an amazing battery, because many of the components (strong CPU/GPU/RAM) aren’t needed and can be replaced with network cards (or more batteries).
Both seem to me like killer features.
MVP implementation
Make:
A dongle that has multiple SIM cards
A “remote desktop” provider and client that support MPTCP (and where the server offers strong GPUs).
This doesn’t have the advantages of a minimalist computer (plus some other things), but I could imagine this would be such a good customer experience that people would start adopting it.
I didn’t check if these components already exist.
Thanks to an anonymous friend for most of this pitch.
I think this gets a lot easier if you drop the idea of a ‘full remote computer’ and instead embrace the idea of just the key data points move.
More like the remote VS Code server or Jupyter Notebook server, being accessed from a Chromebook. All work files would stay saved there, all experiments run from the server (probably by being sent as tasks to yet a third machine.)
Locally, you couldn’t save any files, but you could do (for instance) web browsing. The web browsing could be made extra secure in some way.
I agree that we won’t need full video streaming, it could be compressed (most of the screen doesn’t change most of the time), but I gave that as an upper bound.
If you still run local computation, you lose out on some of the advantages I mentioned.
(If remote vscode is enough for someone, I definitely won’t be pushing back)
For profit AI Security startup idea:
TL;DR: A laptop that is just a remote desktop ( + why this didn’t work before and how to fix that)
Why this is nice for AI Security:
Reduces the amount of GPUs that will be sent to customers
Somewhat better security for this laptop since it’s a bit more like defending a cloud computer. Maybe labs would use this to make the employee computers more secure?
Network spikes: A reason this didn’t work before and how to solve it
The problem: Sometimes the network will be slow for a few seconds. It’s really annoying if this lag also affects things like they keyboard and mouse, which is one reason it’s less fun to work with a remote desktop
Proposed solution: Get multiple network connections to work at the same time:
Specifically, have many network cards (both WIFI and SIM) in the laptop, and use MPTCP to utilize them all.
Also, the bandwidth needed (to the physical laptop) is capped at something like “streaming a video of your screen” (Claude estimates this as 10-20 Mbps if I was gaming), which would probably be easy to get reliable given multiple network connections. Even if the the user is downloading a huge file, the file is actually being downloaded into the remote computer in the data center, enjoying way faster internet connection than a laptop would have.
Why this is nice for customers
Users of the computer can “feel like” they have multiple GPUs connected to their laptop, maybe autoscaling, and with a way better UI than ssh
The laptop can be light, cheap, and have an amazing battery, because many of the components (strong CPU/GPU/RAM) aren’t needed and can be replaced with network cards (or more batteries).
Both seem to me like killer features.
MVP implementation
Make:
A dongle that has multiple SIM cards
A “remote desktop” provider and client that support MPTCP (and where the server offers strong GPUs).
This doesn’t have the advantages of a minimalist computer (plus some other things), but I could imagine this would be such a good customer experience that people would start adopting it.
I didn’t check if these components already exist.
Thanks to an anonymous friend for most of this pitch.
I think this gets a lot easier if you drop the idea of a ‘full remote computer’ and instead embrace the idea of just the key data points move.
More like the remote VS Code server or Jupyter Notebook server, being accessed from a Chromebook. All work files would stay saved there, all experiments run from the server (probably by being sent as tasks to yet a third machine.)
Locally, you couldn’t save any files, but you could do (for instance) web browsing. The web browsing could be made extra secure in some way.
I agree that we won’t need full video streaming, it could be compressed (most of the screen doesn’t change most of the time), but I gave that as an upper bound.
If you still run local computation, you lose out on some of the advantages I mentioned.
(If remote vscode is enough for someone, I definitely won’t be pushing back)