Dumbo startup now allows you to build machine learning software on their future computers

Dumbo startup Paperspace announced on Thursday that it is launching a service to allow startups and software developers to run Linux for cheap in their virtual desktop.

“We’ve been getting a lot of requests from developers, data scientists, startups, and others who have been doing machine learning and who wanted to see if they could run their software on Paperspace,” cofounder Dillon Erb said in an interview Thursday morning. 

Erb’s company is a bit like Airbnb, or many other of the sharing economy startups, but for processing power. It pays for an asset, in this case super heavy duty GPUs and processing power, and rents it out to individual users as they need it.

@HelloPaperspace for Machine Learning is finally launching! More info at https://t.co/eprq3gSC9X and upvote on https://t.co/b8xygijTKX!

— Steven Kuyan (@stevenkuyan) December 15, 2016

“I’ve been impressed with the Paperspace team since Dillon and Dan showed me their first demo at YC…,” Reddit cofounder Alex Ohanion wrote on the company’s Product Hunt launch. “I think their take on machine learning will open up the tech to an even broader audience. I can see this really taking off the developer community.”
With 15 full-time employees split between Brooklyn and remote locales, the company provides heavy-duty computing power for professional-level users. From any device, you can access your desktop on Paperspace, equipped with the GPUs, preloaded software and 1GB fiber, among other top of the line processing specs. Paperspace actually records the user’s keystrokes and mouseclicks, executes the commands and then plays back a stream of the desktop to the user. The goal, Erb said, is to achieve that playback with a lag of less than 60 milliseconds, the industry standard for video games, where the user is unable to notice a delay.
Paperspace works like AWS or Azure, but with a user-friendly experience that’s easier for people who don’t want to start working in a command line immediately. It’s more like renting a fully-furnished Airbnb room than an empty commercial office space.

“Running desktop Linux is not an easy thing to get configured,” Erb explained. “A lot that we’ve done for the launch is its totally done for you. You click and you have a functioning linux computer in the cloud. A lot of programming classes and database classes revolve around getting a linux environment set up and with this it’s done for you.”

Erb said that Paperspace, which raised $2.8 million last year, has some more updates to be on the look out for in the new year.