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AI Dungeon 2 costing over $10k/day to run on GCS/Colab

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Re: AI Dungeon 2 costing over $10k/day to run on GCS/Colab

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Costing for cloud solutions is often not trivial, and a single overlooked parameter can do you in. I at least blame Google partially for having quotas and spending limits set to unlimited by default.

Don't forget Amazon's incomprehensible billing practices for AWS. It seems to be designed to be impossible to figure out what you're going to spend ahead of time.

Amazon really seems to be doing this on purpose. Even tasks as simple as starting an EC2 instance require referencing multiple pages to find out how much this instance will cost you, while some other providers just show the predicted costs/month in the instance creation dialog.

Re: AI Dungeon 2 costing over $10k/day to run on GCS/Colab

#172
post #154

Could someone explain the appeal in keeping this going long-term? When it was posted here, I played it and read several adventure logs here and on reddit. In every case the story is nonsense. Sure some parts read like something a human would write, but anytime you go beyond a few sentences you can see contractions and lack of flow that good human author would never make. Don't get me wrong, it's a cool demo of how fa…

GPT2 is trained on huge amounts of text. it contains every book people haven't read, and can more or less stitch pieces together seamlessly. This is exciting from a research perspective but the hype is out of control already. Despite breaking previosu benchmarks, language benchmarks themselves are not great ways to describe language. I get the excitement but this overselling to the general public is soon gonna lead to a trough of disillusionment.

Re: AI Dungeon 2 costing over $10k/day to run on GCS/Colab

#173

Can I be controversial and ask what justifies such expenses? Why is this game so important that it needs to be up and running so badly? From what I've seen so far the "game" (if you can even call it that) highlights the weaknesses of GPT-2 much more than its strengths (the model's answers to user actions are random, the story is incoherent, the world is inconsistent). I don't get the feeling it was setup to demonstra…

What a cynical input into the conversation. First you assume that this project even existing is some kind of statement about how important it is; a connection I can't make myself unless I try to be extremely cynical. If you actually look at the project website you'll see that the main mirrors are currently down due to high download costs. Then you smugly dismiss the entire project as a GPT-2 weakness highlighter, but…

HN is the only community I know of that has people that will not only call out this kind of attitude, but will do so in an absolutely scathing, bedrock-hitting way.

I hope this is something that never changes about HN. That was a pleasure to read.

Re: AI Dungeon 2 costing over $10k/day to run on GCS/Colab

#176
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Yeah, but your cloud sucks.

Per the HN Guidelines:

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

Hard to say their cloud "sucks" when they offer a solution featuring the very thing being complained about in regards to other cloud services. Or maybe IBM's cloud really is terrible, but it would be hard to know that as an outsider since you failed to provide any substantiating info. If you could expand upon your initial assertion, that would surely help the rest of us see your point and assist you in proving your case.

Re: AI Dungeon 2 costing over $10k/day to run on GCS/Colab

#177
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came across a similar thing in the 90s; one department had an expensive piece of equipment with a three year lifespan. They weren't allowed to amortise that, and any budget increase every three years would have been denied, so they had to include the whole replacement cost in every budget, and find ways of spending that money every year, or lose it.

Uh, I mean, of course I don't know any better than you, but I think parent wasn't entirely serious... obviously. Was he?

He was absolutely serious. It's complete nonsense, of course, but this is also reality.

Re: AI Dungeon 2 costing over $10k/day to run on GCS/Colab

#178

Out of curiosity, how much more time will it cost to run this on general CPUs of users computer?

It takes a couple seconds per reply. GPUs aren't as powerful as everyone would have it, at least not for ML; you'd be lucky to get a 10x speedup.

Re: AI Dungeon 2 costing over $10k/day to run on GCS/Colab

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you describe a little more how you direct downloads to an in-zone copy?

I imagine using known IP ranges ( https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws-ip-ranges.... & https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws-ip-ranges.... ) you could redirect to local resources within their region. I'd probably use Lamda/NodeJS with a ~20 minute in-memory range cache that should stay under 128MB of memory per instance. Perhaps I'd store all the range starts and ends each as two 64-bit ints…

I think they were looking for a solution where you replicate the data natively and direct to that copy for a certain region, rather than cache and serve

Re: AI Dungeon 2 costing over $10k/day to run on GCS/Colab

#180
post #154

Could someone explain the appeal in keeping this going long-term? When it was posted here, I played it and read several adventure logs here and on reddit. In every case the story is nonsense. Sure some parts read like something a human would write, but anytime you go beyond a few sentences you can see contractions and lack of flow that good human author would never make. Don't get me wrong, it's a cool demo of how fa…

Man, why so cynical? I don't see how those Infocom games spoiled you since they were limited to whatever a team of writers could come up with. And a well-written, dynamical-feeling CRPG is so rare that we still trumpet the handful that were any good from 20 years ago like Planescape: Torment.

Here's an example of how this game is fun: https://twitter.com/ptychomancer/status/1203246078989987840

It's just fun to play with.

> you can see contractions and lack of flow that good human author would never make.

That doesn't seem like a sensible goal post. Unless you think the technology is magic, why would you go into this thinking it's going to compete with a master-planned work of fiction by a human writer?

I, on the other hand, am inspired by the game. Imagine Crusader Kings 2 (free on Steam btw) where the events are randomly generated by this kind of story-telling technology. Right now it's kind of boring wondering which of the finite human-written events are going to show up. After playing for a while you go from wondering what crazy event will happen next to knowing all of the events and waiting for your favorite ones to show up.

We're a ways off from embedding a game in this technology, but I think we are within reach of embedding this technology inside a narrative-driven game.

Another example is Dungeons & Dragons. The fun is the sandbox and interacting with the narrative even though the human-driven dynamic storyline is often complete nonsense if you were to read a transcription of what actually happened.

This is the second comment I've read so far that seems to gleefully pat itself on the back for wondering how someone could enjoy something else.

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