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Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI

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Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI

#51

Post by throwawaymsft »

nl wrote: post #24
fovc wrote: post #10

They saved "several percentage points" off of 4.4M MWh, so maybe 250M KWH, which might be $10-20M. At 30x earnings [1], they just made back most if not all of the purchase price of Deepmind [2] [1] https://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/pe_ratio [2] https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/26/google-deepmind/

At 30x earnings [1], they just made back most if not all of the purchase price of Deepmind That's a unique way of defining "made back"

Does Google need to sell the stock to realize their gains and hand investors bags of money?

Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI

#52

Post by WalterBright »

s_m_t wrote: post #14
tdaltonc wrote: post #5

They need to find some medium sized city that will let them play with their traffic lights.

Please! Imagine all the time, gas, and sanity wasted at red lights when there is absolutely no cross traffic!

Yeah, it's obvious there's a heluva lot of low hanging fruit in dynamically adjusting the traffic lights. Lots of them already even have cameras on them, it's just a software problem, and a problem worth scores (hundreds?) of millions to solve (in terms of gas, pollution, and time reductions).

Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI

#53

Post by knowThySelfx »

At some point will AI start to have questions like "Who am I? Who made me? Whats the purpose of my existence?" etc. We will have atheist AI's and theist/deist AI's and what not. I guess it will be time for some AI philosophy.

Makes me wonder if there's a creator, will He/She be amused by our attempts at answering "Who am I" and such questions. Will be fun :D

Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI

#54

Post by nl »

throwawaymsft wrote: post #51
nl wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At 30x earnings [1], they just made back most if not all of the purchase price of Deepmind That's a unique way of defining "made back"

Does Google need to sell the stock to realize their gains and hand investors bags of money?

No. Hu?

"Made Back" usually means "Covered the purchase price".

I was merely commenting on the unusual practice of multiplying revenue by the multiplier that a company is usually bought at and then using that to say that the price is "made back".

I guess one could say something like "that justifies their price using a 30x multiplier on the savings". But that isn't the same thing.

Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI

#55

Post by argonaut »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #37
ACow_Adonis wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. One of the "elephant in the room" parts of all of these corporate/pr press releases dressed up as news/revenue reports is that they never report or investigate opportunity cost: say how much could google have saved with a simple algorithm, homegrown solution, or 4 heuristic if/then/else statements. I've been involved with similar multi-million dollar projects that were reported to be bringing in XX million in…

Deep mind is needed for other things (e.g. search results). Effectively, the cost of developing it is paid for by search et al, and the only cost core infrastructure has is adapting the existing technology to work on power data as well. This is that "synergy" thing we always snicker at when people in suits say it. It just happens to be true here. Sidebar: the sour grapes in this thread about what Google has apparentl…

On the contrary, my experience with HN is that people are across-the-board far too accepting, credulous, and unskeptical of machine learning posts, especially given how most commenters have little ML experience and given how incredibly easy in machine learning it is to create "amazing" results that are actually worthless.

This is particularly unique to the field of AI/ML - it's pretty hard to bullshit a new programming language you've developed, or a new mobile app you've published.

Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI

#56

Post by argonaut »

arbre wrote: post #19
bytefactory wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In recent months, the Alphabet Inc. unit put a DeepMind AI system in control of parts of its data centers to reduce power consumption by manipulating computer servers and related equipment like cooling systems. It uses a similar technique to DeepMind software that taught itself to play Atari video games, Hassabis said in an interview at a recent AI conference in New York." This part really incensed me. That's like d…

I disagree. If you read the atari paper you will get plenty of details and you can infer how it is applied to electricity consumption. They were using reinforcement learning. The algorithms would learn to get a better score by looking at the screen and sending actions accordingly. Here you could imagine the same algorithm with energy consumption as a score, a set of datacenter metrics as the screen (state) and change…

Errr... No. Just no. Deep reinforcement learning is not some pixie dust that magically works for any problem with a reward function that you throw it at. It's astounding how commenters on HN think this is all "easy".

Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI

#58

Post by ucho »

s_m_t wrote: post #14
tdaltonc wrote: post #5

They need to find some medium sized city that will let them play with their traffic lights.

Please! Imagine all the time, gas, and sanity wasted at red lights when there is absolutely no cross traffic!

Yeah, that are exactly the arguments used by companies selling "Intelligent Transportation Systems". After deployment: surprise - there aren't any noticeable changes, except for places that are performing worse and require manual tweaking. Also the best way to reduce traffic in city is to reduce vehicle flow into the city which only moves jams to other places.
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