Am I missing something other commenters are seeing about this not being an ad? The domain is on Burla, which hosted the compute needed for this. There's a giant airbnb x burla logo at the top. People are saying there's a lawsuit pending, it's against guidelines, what's the point, etc..<p>It's content marketing plain and simple for Burla towards people that view this site. It was highly likely done by employees at both Burla and AirBNB together as a joint project.
One of the Burla founders here. Not a joint project with Airbnb. I’ve been experimenting with giving agents access to Burla clusters and letting them run with analysis ideas I find interesting. This was one of the results.<p>The branding is a bit much, fair call, but the intent here was just to explore what these agents can actually build when you give them access to large amounts of compute.
What a waste of energy (money/resources)... Scraping and AI-scanning 2 million photos to identify animals in the advertisement pictures? What's the point.<p>As an exercise a sample of 1000 photos would've been enough. As a database, knowing a listing has a cat in the picture or a funny review doesn't offer any real value.<p>I wonder what the footprint is of such an exercise.
I dunno there are literally 100s of millions (billions?) of people who spend more than an hour per day just scrolling through social media feeds.<p>How much does it cost to send a billion people an hour of video every day? Almost all of the resources tech uses is for pointless or even negative things.<p>What % of compute/bandwidth do you think is used for "real value"? I would guess it is well below 1%.
The pet detection part isn’t the point, that’s just a visible output. The actual goal was to stress test agents + distributed compute on something non-trivial.
“Drug den vibes” and they’re mostly just small rooms?
This thing is ripe for a lawsuit and has terrible methodology as far as I can tell.
This seems like an advertisement for an open source package<p>>Scale Python across 1,000 CPUs or GPUs in 1 second.
Burla is a high-performance parallel processing library with an extremely fast developer experience. Scale batch processing, vector embeddings, inference, or build pipelines with dynamic hardware.<p>Edit: Author comment was flagged dead. They work at burla which is a managed cloud service for parallelizing python
Airbnb was actually started by two guys who created an opium den for Obama's convention so this doesn't surprise me.
"Looking at every public Airbnb listing in Inside Airbnb's open data dump, all at once, on Burla"<p>This Inside Airbnb?<p>Community Guidelines<p>Please:<p>Only take the data you need.
Do not scrape data from the site, if you would like to subscribe to the data directly, please email data@insideairbnb.com
>Everything was parallelized on Burla, on a single dynamic cluster that scaled to ~1.7K CPU workers for photo download and CLIP, with 20 A100 GPUs running embedding clusters in parallel on the same cluster.<p>That's a lot of budget - would have been nice if they'd made an actual donation to the project, instead of pounding the project's servers and bandwidth when there are much better ways to interact with the data.
Totally fair callout. This wasn’t intended to put unnecessary load on anything. We were experimenting with running agents + distributed compute end to end on a real dataset, and this happened to be a good candidate.<p>That said, if this ended up stressing the project’s infrastructure more than expected, happy to make a donation to support it. Appreciate you raising it!
The author makes some pretty insane leaps in logic for classification, and it’s apparent in the photos.<p>“Drug-Den vibes” apparently means the owner is poor or a photo is obscured or badly lit.
These are amazing! Some are probably offensive, because I saw a cozy, if kitschy, British den labeled as "did-someone-just-leave" vibes which... unfair.
This vanity scraping is fucking up the internet for everyone else.<p>It's hardly the only thing, but it's part of the problem.
Ah yes, let's price the world out of the real estate market and then use insanely powerful AI models to systematically mock the living conditions of the poors.
This is pretty great, the reviews at the bottom are the best part. I'm impressed they were able to scrape so much data
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