clustermax is partly sensationalism, and it’s also a true effort that has provided transparency into the confusing market of compute providers. they do feel like the authority on compute without any “checks and balances” (for lack of a better phrase), because it's both the only thing out there, and it's everywhere most people probably don’t find themselves in the weeds of the tiny details of everything (even like the reactions different groups have to clustermax), but this is the stuff I find fun so I’d like to share! many things can be true at once. 1) clustermax has given customers more visibility (much needed). this one's obvious. now you can tell which providers are better than others by looking at a tier list. they run real workloads, and score them on things customers would care about (reliability, networking, etc) 2) the potentially biased dynamic of clustermax - many have said that higher-ups at semianalysis hold equity in lots of companies they rank - even if this didn’t factor into the testing, a few conversations with providers makes it clear that clustermax is on top of everyone’s minds. - ask any compute provider and they might brush it off and say they don't care about clustermax, but you'll notice their mannerisms change as the conversation goes on. if they ranked highly, they might say something like "we love dylan, we're super close with him" if not, it's usually hesitation with something diplomatic (“we're working closely with the team") 3) incentive (mis)alignment to rank providers - you can't rank every provider ever so it gives people insight to whoever's in the ranking - you could bring in a third party to test providers but their incentive to get tested is to rise the clustermax rankings whereas your incentive might be to understand differences in a sea of compute (I'm unsure providers care about "standardizing" compute in the way everyone's talking about wanting to make compute fungible) most would say clustermax a net positive (?). either way, clustermax is a cornerstone of compute and AI. if you believe that AI keeps expanding, companies on clustermax are only going to get bigger