Utilizing Elixir for Local AI Development with Offsite GPUs

Fly.io offers the ability to transmute containers into VMs globally, providing access to fast-booting VMs and GPUs. This allows developers without access to high-end GPUs to take advantage of remote GPU resources for AI development. Elixir, with its Bumblebee library, can run open-source AI models, allowing developers to avoid the latency of AI-as-a-Service by hosting models directly. To utilize this setup, developers can deploy a minimal Elixir application on Fly.io and develop locally, while the application communicates with a remote GPU as if it were connected to the developer's machine. The process involves cloning a ready-to-deploy harness application, deploying on Fly.io, and configuring the local development environment to communicate with the remote application through Elixir's Nx library. Once set up, developers can create new AI features locally, with heavy GPU tasks being run on the remote Fly.io GPU, resulting in a seamless development experience. The article outlines the workflow and provides tips to effectively develop AI features with this hybrid local-remote approach. Using Bumblebee for AI development in Elixir showcases how powerful and flexible the language and ecosystem are when paired with modern infrastructure like Fly.io.