Google has banned the training of deepfakes in Colab • Hacker News Board

Re: Google has banned the training of deepfakes in Colab

#81

Post by whymauri » Sat, May 28, 2022, 8:52 PM UTC

peytoncasper wrote: post #71

chroem- wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By default, Google will not allow you to access GPU instances on regular GCP. The GPU quota is initialized to zero and you have to open a support ticket in order to request GPU access, justifying why your use case deserves access. Evidently, "personal research project" is not a valid use case, so that leaves Colab as the only other option in the Google ecosystem. AWS has a similar quota policy, but they seem less str…

I'm not so sure this is true. I was able to get access to a GPU quota of 1 on GCP within 2 minutes. I highly doubt anyone reviewed what I wrote. I'm not sure how many you were requesting access to, but I suspect the main reason for gating higher counts are cost related. Quite obviously they are not cheap.

I've found that it varies. When I was at MIT, students and affiliates got credits and instances like candy (I feel like the school brand lowered friction). But then on Reddit, Stack Overflow, or Github I see a lot of people struggling to get quota (even when paying for the highest Colab tier).

Re: Google has banned the training of deepfakes in Colab

#82

Post by nmilo » Sat, May 28, 2022, 8:55 PM UTC

DarylZero wrote: post #26

mark_l_watson wrote: post #6

It is their right to ban any use they want. Colab is an awesome service, so much so that I seldom use my at-home GPU rig. As consumers we can use or not use platforms like Google, Twitter, etc. as we like, or not. Colab’s ban will be good for small 3rd party GPU cloud providers and that is a good thing. Same thing with Twitter: in the last month there is now better material on Mastodon.

Quoted post unavailable.

Yes, that's how society works. If you use a service respectfully you get rewarded with the ability to keep using that service.

Re: Google has banned the training of deepfakes in Colab

#83

Post by thorum » Sat, May 28, 2022, 8:59 PM UTC

ClassyJacket wrote: post #24

version_five wrote: post #5

I have wondered in the past what kind of monitoring / data harvesting google is doing with colab. I don't use them for anything nontrivial or work related precisely because I worry about google stealing my stuff or that I would be violating agreements with my customers by exposing their data to google. This story reinforces that they are snooping. That aside, I don't think I find this too upsetting. They don't let pe…

Is there a good alternative to Colab you can just pay for, that's good for hobbyist individuals? Especially one that gives you shell access? I tried using PaperSpace for a while but it works maybe 1 in 3 times I tried to use it, they (temporarily) banned me for no reason, they send me "itemized" bills with empty line items, and their support was no help.

Lambda is great, if you can afford it: https://lambdalabs.com/service/gpu-cloud/pricing

Re: Google has banned the training of deepfakes in Colab

#84

Post by summerlight » Sat, May 28, 2022, 9:00 PM UTC

version_five wrote: post #5

I have wondered in the past what kind of monitoring / data harvesting google is doing with colab. I don't use them for anything nontrivial or work related precisely because I worry about google stealing my stuff or that I would be violating agreements with my customers by exposing their data to google. This story reinforces that they are snooping. That aside, I don't think I find this too upsetting. They don't let pe…

> I worry about google stealing my stuff or that I would be violating agreements with my customers by exposing their data to google.

Perhaps it just follows Google cloud's user data policy as long as you're using a paid service? But the latter might be a legitimate concern; some customer may ask their data not to leave any networks outside the contract and depending on this types of public services will increases the likelihood of such accidents.

Re: Google has banned the training of deepfakes in Colab

#85

Post by rockemsockem » Sat, May 28, 2022, 9:00 PM UTC

humanistbot wrote: post #13

nestorD wrote: post #4

I really do not like that because the ban feels fuzzy. If you are a researcher exploring those algorithms and using Colab because you have very limited GPU access of you own, you might now be worried that your very own topic of research will get you banned from the ressource you are using.

It's only banned for the free tier.

This small fact makes a huge difference. A researcher can certainly afford colab's modestly priced pro tier.

Re: Google has banned the training of deepfakes in Colab

#86

Post by kmeisthax » Sat, May 28, 2022, 9:01 PM UTC

ClassyJacket wrote: post #24

version_five wrote: post #5

I have wondered in the past what kind of monitoring / data harvesting google is doing with colab. I don't use them for anything nontrivial or work related precisely because I worry about google stealing my stuff or that I would be violating agreements with my customers by exposing their data to google. This story reinforces that they are snooping. That aside, I don't think I find this too upsetting. They don't let pe…

Is there a good alternative to Colab you can just pay for, that's good for hobbyist individuals? Especially one that gives you shell access? I tried using PaperSpace for a while but it works maybe 1 in 3 times I tried to use it, they (temporarily) banned me for no reason, they send me "itemized" bills with empty line items, and their support was no help.

JupyterLab

I've migrated several notebooks from Colab to JupyterLab when playing around with various generative art models; it's a drop-in replacement and runs on your local machine's hardware.

I did have to do some fiddling to install a bunch of Nvidia crap on my local machine, however; blame CUDA.

Re: Google has banned the training of deepfakes in Colab

#87

Post by rockemsockem » Sat, May 28, 2022, 9:07 PM UTC

Hard_Space wrote: post #22

mupuff1234 wrote: post #12

The article and headline are pretty misleading imo, the ban seems like it's only for the free tier. Edit: Actually, it's not really clear.

At the bottom of the FAQ section[1] that bans deepfakes, it says ' Additional restrictions exist for paid users', not 'different restrictions'. [1] https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html#limitation...

But if you click that link for "Additional Restrictions" there's nothing about deepfakes mentioned for pro.

3. Restrictions. In this Section 3, the phrase “you will not” means “you will not, will not attempt, and will not permit a third party to”.

When you use the Paid Service, you will not:

share your Google account password with someone else to allow them to access any Paid Service that the person did not order; access the Paid Service other than by means authorized by Google; copy, sell, rent, or sublicense the Paid Services to any third party; use the Paid Service as a general file-hosting or media-serving platform; engage in peer-to-peer file-sharing; or mine cryptocurrency.

Re: Google has banned the training of deepfakes in Colab

#88

Post by orlp » Sat, May 28, 2022, 9:10 PM UTC

The results of GPT-3, Imagen, Github Copilot, etc, have shown me two things:

1. A critical part of AI that was missing no longer is: the model of our world. In natural language processing (more generally anything that interacts with humans) it has been an eternal issue that to understand sentences you must know the content, and therefore must, in theory, know 'everything' there is to our world and culture. As far as I'm concerned, the current large transformer models have captured this. There is genuine intelligence here, a lack of reasoning still but an abundance of knowledge.

2. We are entering a terrifying era of computing. The amount of resources needed to get the genuine AI above, are monstrous (at least with our current methods). Not only raw computing power, but also data. This means an unavoidable centralization and monopolization of something that I predict will be an essential component for human-computer interaction in the decades to come.

What we're seeing here is a sign of (2).

My prediction? Google and Facebook are here to stay. Their primary income right now is advertisement, I expect this to change over the next decade. Specifically these two companies are sitting on the biggest 'oil field' in modern history: an endless pipeline of modern human culture, ready to feed into ever larger models of our world.

Re: Google has banned the training of deepfakes in Colab

#89

Post by rockemsockem » Sat, May 28, 2022, 9:10 PM UTC

malcolmgreaves wrote: post #57

Good! Deepfakes are going to be a massive problem for society going forward. Glad to see Google is at least recognizing it's responsibility as a compute platform here.

It's only restricted on the free tier.

Honestly they're probably finding that, like cryptocurrency miners, free tier deepfake users born burn lots of GPU time compared to others who might run a couple GPU tasks for a little while to get a few results or test things.

Re: Google has banned the training of deepfakes in Colab

#90

Post by sinenomine » Sat, May 28, 2022, 9:22 PM UTC

orlp wrote: post #88

The results of GPT-3, Imagen, Github Copilot, etc, have shown me two things: 1. A critical part of AI that was missing no longer is: the model of our world. In natural language processing (more generally anything that interacts with humans) it has been an eternal issue that to understand sentences you must know the content, and therefore must, in theory, know 'everything' there is to our world and culture. As far as…

While I partially agree with the theses, one should note that in absolute terms the compute spent even on the largest models of their kind is still pretty tame, compared to SV software engineer salaries: you could train your own Imagen for ~200000$. This is pretty much kickstarter-tier, and not at the higher end of the distribution.

The web-scale data is also available: we already have a dataset superior to one Imagen used: https://laion.ai/laion-5b-a-new-era-of-open-large-scale-mult...

Instead of despairing, we should train capable models in the open, like BigScience does: https://bigscience.huggingface.co/blog/what-language-model-t... and petition our governments to train & make available large models under permissive licenses, for the benefit of the public and small businesses.

The big tech exceptionalism is overblown, you don't really need exotic engineering to train an LLM with Jax and a TPU pod, or whatever accelerator you managed to procure.