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The post-exponential era of AI and Moore’s Law

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Re: The post-exponential era of AI and Moore’s Law

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardest part might be to create one that can store enough energy to last through a five-hour match.

Why couldn't it just change batteries as needed, or just be wired up to power for that matter? I'd expect something like wrestling would be much more challenging than non-contact sports, assuming, of course, that the robot's strength and torque was limited to human levels. Wrestling is actually a pretty interesting case, now that I think about it for a bit, as robots wouldn't need to be limited to human-like bodies.…

> Why couldn't it just change batteries as needed, or just be wired up to power for that matter?

Because the human it's playing can't. In a sport where endurance is a significant component, wiring one competitor up to power, while the other has to use only the fuel that he/she has stored, doesn't seem like an equitable competition.

Re: The post-exponential era of AI and Moore’s Law

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about 16-bit floats, or even INT8 or INT4, as the basis of neural nets these days, pushing the problem back to CPU-cycles. CNNs in particular recycle the same set of weights over-and-over again, fitting inside of the tiny caches (or shared-memory in GPUs), allowing for the compute-portion of the hardware to really work the data. > CPU cycles are limitless. Most of the time the CPU is waiting for the mem…

So I assume that we are talking about Moores law for cpu/gpu and not for memory. The bottleneck for GPU today is the amount of memory on board and not compute. Especially with large size models. In addition, the problem with deep learning, in general, is the seq nature of the alg. I.e it is parallel within the layer, but not between layers. And for multi gpu setup, again it is the communication link between the GPUs.…

> The bottleneck for GPU today is the amount of memory on board and not compute. Especially with large size models.

Well... everything "depends on the model". Some models will be GPU-compute limited, others will be bandwidth-limited, and others will be capacity limited.

> In addition, the problem with deep learning, in general, is the seq nature of the alg. I.e it is parallel within the layer, but not between layers. And for multi gpu setup, again it is the communication link between the GPUs.

You should increase the size of the model to increase parallelism. Any problem has sequential-bits and parallel bits, so we can't stop the sequential nature of problems.

But the idea is to think NOT in terms of Ahmdal's law, but instead in terms of Gustafson's law. When you have a computer that's twice-as-parallel, you need to double the work done.

You can't reasonably expect things to get faster-and-faster (Ahmdal's law). Instead, you load up more-and-more work the wider-and-wider machines get.

In the case of neural nets, instead of doing 128x128x5 sized kernels, you upgrade to 256x256x5 sized kernels as GPUs get thicker.

Moore's law was never about the "speed of computers", but instead about "the number of transistors". As such, its Gustafson's law that best scales with Moore's law. We've got another 5 to 10 years left in Moore's law by the way: denser memory, denser GPU compute, 5nm-class chips (probably networked as a bunch of chiplets).

We will have more CPU / GPU power, as well as more RAM density, in the future. The question is how to organize our code so that we'll be ready 5 years from now for the next-gen of hardware.

Re: The post-exponential era of AI and Moore’s Law

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I assume that we are talking about Moores law for cpu/gpu and not for memory. The bottleneck for GPU today is the amount of memory on board and not compute. Especially with large size models. In addition, the problem with deep learning, in general, is the seq nature of the alg. I.e it is parallel within the layer, but not between layers. And for multi gpu setup, again it is the communication link between the GPUs.…

> The bottleneck for GPU today is the amount of memory on board and not compute. Especially with large size models. Well... everything "depends on the model". Some models will be GPU-compute limited, others will be bandwidth-limited, and others will be capacity limited. > In addition, the problem with deep learning, in general, is the seq nature of the alg. I.e it is parallel within the layer, but not between layers.…

Thank you for your insights. Good info.

Re: The post-exponential era of AI and Moore’s Law

#124
Moore's law may be dead, but it is still mind boggling to project if forwards.. Seth lloyd in his paper [1] on the limits of computation, mentions in 250 years computational density will equal that of a black hole (kilogram sized). [1] https://cds.cern.ch/record/396654/files/9908043.pdf

Re: The post-exponential era of AI and Moore’s Law

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great read. To follow up also read a comment on that piece titled "A better lesson" by Rodney Brooks: https://rodneybrooks.com/a-better-lesson/

> One of the most celebrated successes of Deep Learning is image labeling, using CNNs, Convolutional Neural Networks, but the very essence of CNNs is that the front end of the network is designed by humans to manage translational invariance, the idea that objects can appear anywhere in the frame. To have a Deep Learning network also have to learn that seems pedantic to the extreme, and will drive up the computational…

I often imagine young babies are staring around not in "childlike wonder" as much as an LSD drug trip, with their little minds laboring to discover any kind of correlation in an assault of data.

Re: The post-exponential era of AI and Moore’s Law

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why couldn't it just change batteries as needed, or just be wired up to power for that matter? I'd expect something like wrestling would be much more challenging than non-contact sports, assuming, of course, that the robot's strength and torque was limited to human levels. Wrestling is actually a pretty interesting case, now that I think about it for a bit, as robots wouldn't need to be limited to human-like bodies.…

> Why couldn't it just change batteries as needed, or just be wired up to power for that matter? Because the human it's playing can't. In a sport where endurance is a significant component, wiring one competitor up to power, while the other has to use only the fuel that he/she has stored, doesn't seem like an equitable competition.

I agree that it must be battery powered, but keep in mind that human players eat snacks during long matches.

Re: The post-exponential era of AI and Moore’s Law

#127
post #56

I predict there will be much more assembly programming required in the future to squeeze out as much as performance as possible because the end of Moore's Law is already very apparent for several applications that can not be easily parallelized. It is a complete myth that you "can't beat the C-compiler" as it is claimed so often. The compiler can't know many things you know about the problem at hand. So far I have be…

[deleted]

Re: The post-exponential era of AI and Moore’s Law

#128
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be that the slowing of Moore's Law results in a more diverse array of specialized computing hardware. After all, the resurgence of ML didn't happen because x86 got fast enough, but because video games - of all things - funded the maturation of a whole new category of massively-parallel chips.

the resurgence of ML ... because video games - of all things - funded the maturation of a whole new category of massively-parallel chips Fake news. It has far more to do with the rise of distributed computing than the existence of GPUs.

I don't think this is very true. You can trace the deep learning revolution back to VGG and a fundamental driver in the success of the first multi-level networks was the ability to train in semi-reasonable amounts of time using GPUs.

Even today distributed training is relatively uncommon while pretty much everyone uses NVIDIA GPUs.

Re: The post-exponential era of AI and Moore’s Law

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about 16-bit floats, or even INT8 or INT4, as the basis of neural nets these days, pushing the problem back to CPU-cycles. CNNs in particular recycle the same set of weights over-and-over again, fitting inside of the tiny caches (or shared-memory in GPUs), allowing for the compute-portion of the hardware to really work the data. > CPU cycles are limitless. Most of the time the CPU is waiting for the mem…

So I assume that we are talking about Moores law for cpu/gpu and not for memory. The bottleneck for GPU today is the amount of memory on board and not compute. Especially with large size models. In addition, the problem with deep learning, in general, is the seq nature of the alg. I.e it is parallel within the layer, but not between layers. And for multi gpu setup, again it is the communication link between the GPUs.…

> The bottleneck for GPU today is the amount of memory on board and not compute. Especially with large size models

This is somewhat true, but not at clear cut as you make it seem. Most deep learning training I've been part of is realistically bottlenecked by compute. Increased memory usage is a way to improve the compute efficiency (less time moving between GPU and CPU). I haven't worked hands-on with the recent big NLP models so I could be mistaken in that domain, but there is a lot of evidence that model parallelism and hybrid parallelism work (technically - financially is less clear) so the memory limits of a single GPU/ASIC are less important than previously.

One day I hope to see metaoptimization - for example particle swarm optimization - used to parallelize training so it is truly horizontally scalable, but right now the cost/hardware availability is a blocker.

Re: The post-exponential era of AI and Moore’s Law

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why couldn't it just change batteries as needed, or just be wired up to power for that matter? I'd expect something like wrestling would be much more challenging than non-contact sports, assuming, of course, that the robot's strength and torque was limited to human levels. Wrestling is actually a pretty interesting case, now that I think about it for a bit, as robots wouldn't need to be limited to human-like bodies.…

> Why couldn't it just change batteries as needed, or just be wired up to power for that matter? Because the human it's playing can't. In a sport where endurance is a significant component, wiring one competitor up to power, while the other has to use only the fuel that he/she has stored, doesn't seem like an equitable competition.

Are you suggesting to ban human players from drinking water during the match?
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