Salad vs Vast.ai — Comparison

Salad

Save up to 90% on cloud costs compared to hyperscalers. Deploy AI/ML production models easily on the world's largest distributed cloud. Perfect f

Every day, 1000s of users share their resources on SaladCloud for rewards while 100s of businesses run workloads in a secure, affordable sustainable manner. Our employees are real people with real lives. That’s why we encourage everyone to prioritize family, indulge in favorite pastimes, or decompress on a well-earned unplug—without checking those pesky emails. We outfit every new hire with a laptop or desktop computer, along with any software they'll need to do their best work. There's no spyware pre-installed, but you may need to wipe Bob's old Age of Empires II saves. We cover 75% of all health insurance premiums for our employees and their dependents—whether or not they elect the company health plan. Salad is healthy, after all. Salad employees can expense up to $500 in home office upgrades. Whether you need a new office chair, a spiffier webcam, or a reticulated spline, we'll help you get what you need to build out your corner of the Salad Kitchen. Since our founding, that mission statement has appeared, in some form or another, on everything from blackboards and slide decks to pizza boxes and foreheads. It's a testament to the tireless efforts of everyone who has helped build Salad into a successful company—but a brand is more than a mission statement. The true measure of a brand is the integrity of its viewpoint. Making money may help us pursue the objective, but our brand values represent promises made to ourselves, our partners, and our friends in The Kitchen.

Vast.ai

Real-Time GPU Pricing

Vast.ai is a GPU compute marketplace founded on one idea: whoever controls compute controls AI. We exist to make sure that power stays distributed. Christian Horne — a fellow thinker and builder who also published on LessWrong — shared Jake's view that the compute scaling thesis had profound implications, not just for AI development, but for who would control it. Both saw the same thing: if whoever controlled the most compute controlled the most powerful AI, then the future of artificial general intelligence would be determined by who had the deepest pockets, not who had the best ideas. On June 28, 2016, they incorporated Vast.ai. The founding thesis fit on a napkin: the world was full of underutilized GPU hardware — in gaming rigs, mining farms, research labs, and small data centers — and the people who needed that compute most couldn't afford the hyperscaler rates. But the motivation was never purely commercial. A world where compute flows freely to thousands of independent researchers is a fundamentally different world than one where it is locked behind the pricing walls of a few incumbents. “A world where compute flows freely to thousands of independent researchers is a fundamentally different world than one where it is locked behind the pricing walls of AWS, GCP, and Azure.” What Jake predicted. What the team built. How the field caught up. Jake Cannell publishes a series of essays on LessWrong arguing that intelligence is fundamentally a function of compute — not clever algorithms or hand-engineered modules. Christian Horne (lahwran), a fellow LessWrong contributor, shares the same conviction. The two become collaborators. AlexNet breaks ImageNet benchmarks by scaling a known neural network architecture on GPUs — exactly as the scaling hypothesis predicted. The deep learning revolution begins. Jake publishes his landmark essay arguing that the human brain is a single, general-purpose learning algorithm — not a zoo of specialized circuits. He predicts AlphaGo two years before it happens and forecasts human-level vision (~2024±3) and language via scaled deep learning. Jake Cannell and Christian Horne incorporate Vast.ai as a Delaware C Corporation. The founding thesis: the world is full of underutilized GPU hardware, and the people who need that compute most can’t afford hyperscaler rates. The market needs a two-sided platform. For two years, Jake and Christian build the marketplace platform end-to-end: host onboarding, search interface, pricing engine, Docker-based instance management — engineered to work across heterogeneous hardware and wildly different network conditions. Vast.ai launches — not with a press release, but the way honest products launch: to friends, family, and a post on Hacker News. GPU compute 3–5x cheaper than AWS, available in seconds, no enterprise contract required. Early independent hosts join the platform. The marketplace concept is validated — developers get cheaper GPUs, hosts monetize idle har

Salad

Vast.ai

Salad

Vast.ai

Salad

Vast.ai