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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

#191
post #100

I am, personally, amazed by this. The following might be kinda NSFW, though. > You are Jesus, a knight living in the kingdom of Larion. You have a steel longsword and a wooden shield. You are on a quest to defeat the evil dragon of Larion. You've heard he lives up at the north of the kingdom. You set on the path to defeat him and walk into a dark forest. As you enter the forest you see a huge black dragon flying abov…

Still a better love story than Twilight.

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

#192
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an "SRE engineer", I don't agree. Certainly in an university/R&D environment, you cannot compete with what 'the cloud' is able to offer within the reach of a few mouse clicks. It would be absolutely moronic to set up an entire infra yourself with GPU's, ... specifically tailored to for 1 research project to then throw it away after a few months, or see the scope change every 2 weeks. One of the reasons such AI tec…

At 10k per day it is absolutely worth it to hire someone to take care of a bunch of cheap servers.

Servers with GPU's are not going to be cheap :)

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

#193

Wait, wait, this is a university developing something, that needs to be downloaded, they choose a commercial solution for that, and that costs them $10k per day? They don't have their own file-hosting solutions? At a university with an AI dept? With that money ("for a couple of days"), you could buy your own server and do it yourself, for a fraction of the price. And don't tell me you can't find people who'd be capab…

[deleted]

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

#194

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…

>> 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.

That would be cynical, but I did not make this assumption. I questioned the justification of the high cost to maintain the project, not the existence of the project per se.

I did not doubt that people enjoyed the project but, again, I don't understand how a research lab justifies paying such a high cost to provide entertainment.

If the project could be maintained for free then I would not have any questions. But if a lab is spending $10k to keep a game running then yes, I have to wonder why.

I do think that the game shows up GPT-2's weaknesses. Do you really think it's "bile" or "cynical" to recognise weaknesses of a technology?

Perhaps I'm cynical to assume it's advertisement. I apologise if that's the case.

Note also that accusing me of bile is a personal comment that I think is unnecessary.

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

#195

Wait, wait, this is a university developing something, that needs to be downloaded, they choose a commercial solution for that, and that costs them $10k per day? They don't have their own file-hosting solutions? At a university with an AI dept? With that money ("for a couple of days"), you could buy your own server and do it yourself, for a fraction of the price. And don't tell me you can't find people who'd be capab…

> What am I missing?

There are a couple of things. First off, academic funding for things like AI-capable clusters is a whole thing, let alone the support staff for them. This is difficult for a host of reasons, some good and some bad.

Secondly, this isn't about hosting files really, it's about providing a suitable environment to run the model in. You can expect a AI research lab to have figured out how to do training in a reasonable way, but what they have here is more of an inference in production problem. That's really outside the expected expertise of a research lab. In the old days you just wouldn't be able to access this simply. Today there are turn-key(ish) solutions with built in scaling; they used one - it scaled and now they are wincing at the bill.

This isn't crazy, as the google->google egress fees are not obvious.

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

#196
post #183
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

So be more constructive, I'd like to learn more about IBM Cloud as I have no experience with it. Is there a Lambda-like service, pay-by-use 'serverless' database hosting, and support for direct client-to-DB connections with RLS/ACLs?

Are you looking for something inside IBM cloud? If not, FaunaDB might be interesting? It's a serverless database, pay as you go (with free tier), security layer for client to DB connections, strongly consistent, scalable and distributed (multiple regions). Disclaimer: I work for them.

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

#197
post #137

So to catch up, AID2 is leveraging a cute offering by Google Colab which will provide any Google account a few hours of free access to a fairly powerful GPU. To use Colab under this arrangement, each person playing the game has to load the model into their personal VM, which is being billed by Google as 6GB of data transfer from GCP into Colab. The obvious questions; 1) Was there a place they could have hosted the mo…

Google Drive is actually perfect for this as it lets you mount the drive (presumably as NAS) so you can read from it directly. I set up a notebook for it but unfortunately the shared folder got rate-limited. It still works if you make a copy of the files in your own Google drive though.

https://colab.research.google.com/github/Akababa/AIDungeon/b...

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

#199
post #137

So to catch up, AID2 is leveraging a cute offering by Google Colab which will provide any Google account a few hours of free access to a fairly powerful GPU. To use Colab under this arrangement, each person playing the game has to load the model into their personal VM, which is being billed by Google as 6GB of data transfer from GCP into Colab. The obvious questions; 1) Was there a place they could have hosted the mo…

The obvious question to me is why must the cost fall on the provider instead of the player? If micropayments were easy enough then this would've been sustainable.

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

#200

Not blaming them, but still a nice example to illustrate the myth that 'the cloud' will let you operate without a sysadmin (someone that knows about setting up and managing infrastructure). Yes, there might not be servers you have to rack and electrical power to be provisioned, but the amount and granularity of the parameters and decisions on the virtual fabric to be decided on and continuously monitored for changes…

Also, at least from what I've witnessed, the kind of sysadmin activities often stated as those that cloud eliminates was already becoming a vanishingly small element of the day-to-day work involved in being a sysadmin. It was already going away, and cloud was not the reason. But with the whole cloud = ditch sysadmins, and the weird way that 'devops' was interpreted to mean a similar thing, a whole lot of baby got thr…

> Also, at least from what I've witnessed, the kind of sysadmin activities often stated as those that cloud eliminates was already becoming a vanishingly small element of the day-to-day work involved in being a sysadmin.

This. Most of my work is not technical and consists of technical-ish meetings, and budget arguments.

Automation is part of that, but also that a lot of stuff is fairly robust and works (mostly) after initial config. Three weeks of setup, plus some shakedown (and a few late nights when the new mission-critical system stutters), but then it's mostly autopilot, or scheduled maintenance.

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