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Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

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Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#4

that's not very much in the business range, it's a lot when it comes to paying us salaries.

Any company of any size that doesn't learn the right lessons from a $10M mistake will be out of business before long.

That's like staffing a single-manager team on a bad project for a year. Which I assure you happens all the time in big companies, and yet they survive.

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#5
If this ran on google's own cloud it amounts to internal bookkeeping. The only cost is then the electricity and used capacity. Not consumer pricing. So negligible.

It is rather unfortunate that this sort of paper is hard to reproduce.

That is a BIG downside, because it makes the result unreliable. They invested effort and money in getting an unreliable result. But perhaps other research will corroborate. Or it may give them an edge in their business, for a while.

They chose to publish. So they are interested in seeing it reproduced or improved upon.

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#6
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any company of any size that doesn't learn the right lessons from a $10M mistake will be out of business before long.

That's like staffing a single-manager team on a bad project for a year. Which I assure you happens all the time in big companies, and yet they survive.

They are not saying it doesn't happen. They are saying: The companies that don't learn from these mistakes will go out of business before long.

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#7

that's not very much in the business range, it's a lot when it comes to paying us salaries.

Any company of any size that doesn't learn the right lessons from a $10M mistake will be out of business before long.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

I’m confident each one of them were multiple of $10M investments.

And this is just what we know because they were launched publicly.

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#8
This is calculation is pretty pointless and the title is flat out wrong. It also gets lost in finer details while totally missing the bigger picture. After all, the original paper written by people either working for Google or at Google. So you can safely assume they used Google resources. That means they wouldn't have used H100s, but Google TPUs. Since they design and own these TPUs, you can also safely assume that they don't pay whatever they charge end users for them. At the scale of Google, this basically amounts to the cost of houseing/electricity, and even that could be a tax write-off. You also can't directly assume that the on paper performance of something like an H100 will be the actual utilization you can achieve, so basing any estimate in terms of $/GPU-hour will be off by default.

That means Google payed way less than this amount and if you wanted to reproduce the paper yourself, you would potentially pay a lot more, depending on how many engineers you have in your team to squeeze every bit of performance per hour out of your cluster.

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#9

This is calculation is pretty pointless and the title is flat out wrong. It also gets lost in finer details while totally missing the bigger picture. After all, the original paper written by people either working for Google or at Google. So you can safely assume they used Google resources. That means they wouldn't have used H100s, but Google TPUs. Since they design and own these TPUs, you can also safely assume that…

Even if they did use H100s and paid the current premium on them, you could probably buy 100 H100s and the boxes to put them in for less than $10M.

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#10
post #6
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like staffing a single-manager team on a bad project for a year. Which I assure you happens all the time in big companies, and yet they survive.

They are not saying it doesn't happen. They are saying: The companies that don't learn from these mistakes will go out of business before long.

In principle, for some other company, sure.

Google makes ~$300b a year in profit. They could make a $10m mistake every day and barely make a dent in it.

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