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Ask HN: What is your take on carbon emissions of Machine Learning

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Re: Ask HN: What is your take on carbon emissions of Machine Learning

#11

Post by cultofmetatron »

danschmitt wrote: post #9
cultofmetatron wrote: post #8

carbon emissions from deep learning and machine learning will drop once we switch to the new analog hybrid circuitry thats being developed.

Could you explain this in more detail? I am not very familiar with analog hybrid circuits for ML.

basicly, we can do things like matrix operations and differntial equations using specialized hardware that performs computation over analog signals rather than buidlign discrete systems. the end result is that we dont' need anywhere near the level of compute to do the job as its done using an analog of the physical process.

here's two youtube videos that explain is much better than I could. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgF3OX8nT0w&ab_channel=Verit... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVsUOuSjvcg&ab_channel=Verit...

suffice to say, your average house fly exhibits behavior that absolutely dominates our best drones and with a fraction of the circuitry.

Re: Ask HN: What is your take on carbon emissions of Machine Learning

#12

Post by lostdog »

The emissions of ML are not a special category. It's like caring about the emissions of addition vs subtraction, but ignoring every other math operation.

Training is infrequent, and everyone involved cares about making training more efficient and faster.

If you care about emissions, then tax, penalize, and regulate emissions. Everyone doing ML will then look at what's costly, and adjust how they use ML models to fit their budget.

Frankly, ML is the best and most efficient way to solve many important problems. For some problems, it's the only technique that works. Trying to limit ML as though it's a special source of emissions is one of the most counterproductive lines of thinking I've ever come across.

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