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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

#61

Post by imtringued »

arcade79 wrote: post #11

A lot of misunderstandings among the commenters here. From the link: "the total compute cost it would take to replicate the paper" It's not Google's cost. Google's cost is of course entirely different. It's the cost for the author if he were to rent the resources to replicate the paper. For Google, all of it is running at a "best effort" resource tier, grabbing available resources when not requested by higher priorit…

According to neoclassical economists this is impossible since you can easily and instantaneously scale infrastructure up and down continuously at no cost and the future is known so demand can be predicted reliably.

The problem with neoclassical economics is that it doesn't concern itself with the physical counterpart of liquidity. It is assumed that the physical world is just as liquid as the monetary world.

The "liquidity mismatch" between money and physical capital must be bridged through overprovisioning on the physical side. If you want the option to choose among n different products, but only choose m products, then the n - m unsold products must be priced into the m bought products. If you can repurpose the unsold products, then you make a profit or you can lower costs for the buyer of the m products.

I would even go as far as to say that the production of liquidity is probably the driving force of the economy, because it means we don't have to do complicated central planning and instead use simple regression models.

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#62

Post by mikepurvis »

bombcar wrote: post #15
arcade79 wrote: post #11

A lot of misunderstandings among the commenters here. From the link: "the total compute cost it would take to replicate the paper" It's not Google's cost. Google's cost is of course entirely different. It's the cost for the author if he were to rent the resources to replicate the paper. For Google, all of it is running at a "best effort" resource tier, grabbing available resources when not requested by higher priorit…

This is the side effect of underutilized capital and it’s present in many cases. For example, if YOU want to rent a backhoe to do some yard rearrangement it’s going to cost you. But Bob who owns BackHoesInc has them sitting around all the time when they’re not being rented or used; he can rearrange his yard wholesale or almost free.

Car lots with attached garages are like this too. That brake and suspension work they were going to charge you several thousand dollars for? Once you trade in ol' Bessie they'll do that for pennies on the dollar during slack time; it doesn't hurt them if the car sits around for a few weeks or months before being ready for sale.

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#64

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

mikepurvis wrote: post #62
bombcar wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the side effect of underutilized capital and it’s present in many cases. For example, if YOU want to rent a backhoe to do some yard rearrangement it’s going to cost you. But Bob who owns BackHoesInc has them sitting around all the time when they’re not being rented or used; he can rearrange his yard wholesale or almost free.

Car lots with attached garages are like this too. That brake and suspension work they were going to charge you several thousand dollars for? Once you trade in ol' Bessie they'll do that for pennies on the dollar during slack time; it doesn't hurt them if the car sits around for a few weeks or months before being ready for sale.

> Car lots with attached garages are like this too.

This was my first job after moving into this state. Between my labor and parts, it was about 15% of the sale price.

My most interesting repair was a 1943 Cadillac, a 'war car'.

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#65

Post by a_bonobo »

simonw wrote: post #53
echoangle wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone not in the AI space, what do you think is the reason for publishing? Marketing and hype for your products?

Retaining your researchers so they don't get frustrated and move to another company that lets them publish.

and attracting other researchers so your competitors can't pick them up to potentially harm your own business

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#67

Post by rgmerk »

Worth pointing out here that in other scientific domains, papers routinely require hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions of dollars, of resources to produce.

My wife works on high-throughout drug screens. They routinely use over $100,000 of consumables in a single screen, not counting the cost of the screening “libraries”, the cost of using some of the -$10mil of equipment in the lab for several weeks, the cost of the staff in the lab itself, and the cost of the time of the scientists who request the screens and then take the results and turn them into papers.

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#68

Post by K0balt »

BartjeD wrote: post #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 gi…

I’d imagine publishing is more oriented toward attracting and retaining talent. You need to scratch that itch or the academics will jump ship.

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#69

Post by michaelt »

g15jv2dp wrote: post #27
rty32 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opportunity cost is cost. What you could have earned by selling the resources to customers instead of using them yourself is what the resources are worth.

This assumes that you can sell 100% of the resources' availability 100% of the time. Whenever you have more capacity that you can sell, there's no opportunity cost in using it yourself.

A few months back, a lot of the most powerful GPU instances on GCP seemed to be sold out 24/7.

I suppose it's possible Google's own infrastructure is partitioned from GCP infrastructure, so they have a bunch of idle GPUs even while their cloud division can sell every H100 and A100 they can get their hands on?

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#70

Post by thaumasiotes »

immibis wrote: post #60
efitz wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a better description than “underutilized” would be “sunk capex cost” - Google (or any cloud provider) cannot run at 100% customer utilization because then they could neither acquire new customers nor service transitory usage spikes for existing customers. So they stay ahead of predicted demand, which means that they will almost always have excess capacity available. Cloud providers pay capital costs (CapEx) f…

There is also a mathematical relationship in queuing theory between utilization and average queue length, which all programmers should be told: https://blog.danslimmon.com/2016/08/26/the-most-important-th... As you run close to 100% utilization, you also run close to infinity waiting times. You don't want that. It might be acceptable for your internal projects (the actual waiting time won't be infinity, and you'll ca…

There is a genre of game called "time management games" which will hammer this point home if you play them. They're not really considered 'serious' games, so you can find them in places where the audience is basically looking to kill time.

https://www.bigfishgames.com/us/en/games/5941/roads-of-rome/...

The structure of a time management game is:

1. There's a bunch of stuff to do on the map.

2. You have a small number of workers.

3. The way a task gets done is, you click on it, and the next time a worker is available, the worker will start on that task, which occupies the worker for some fixed amount of time until the task is complete.

4. Some tasks can't be queued until you meet a requirement such as completing a predecessor task or having enough resources to pay the costs of the task.

You will learn immediately that having a long queue means flailing helplessly while your workers ignore hair-on-fire urgent tasks in favor of completely unimportant ones that you clicked on while everything seemed relaxed. It's far more important that you have the ability to respond to a change in circumstances than to have all of your workers occupied at all times.

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