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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

#91

Post by theptip »

ash-ali wrote: post #80
rrr_oh_man wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They chose to publish. So they are interested in seeing it reproduced or improved upon. Call me cynical, but this is not what I experienced to be the #1 reason of publishing AI papers.

I hope someone could share their insight on this comment. I think the other comments are fragile and don't hold too strongly.

Marketing of some sort. Either “come to Google and you’ll have access to H100s and freedom to publish and get to work with other people who publish good papers”, which appeals to the best researchers, or for smaller companies, benchmark pushing to help with brand awareness and securing VC funding.

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#92

Post by ape4 »

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…

Its like them running SETI@home ;)

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#93

Post by paxys »

ramraj07 wrote: post #83
rgmerk wrote: post #67

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,…

I estimated that any paper that has mouse work and produced in a first world country (I.e. they have to do good by the animals), the minimum cost of that paper in expenses and salary would be $200,000. Average likely higher. Tens of thousands of papers a year published like this!

These are mostly fixed costs. If you produce a hundred papers from the same team and same research, the costs aren't 100x.

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#94

Post by dylan604 »

stavros wrote: post #84
jfengel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the electricity cost negligible? It's a pretty compute intensive application. Of course it would be a tiny fraction of the $10m figure here, but even 1% would be $100,000. Negligible to Google, but for Google even $10 million is couch cushion money.

I feel like your comment answers itself: If you have the money to be running a datacenter of thousands of A100 GPUs (or equivalent), the cost of the electricity is negligible to you, and definitely worth training a SOTA model with your spare compute.

Is it really spare compute? Is the demand from others so low that these systems are truly idle? Does this also artificially make it look like demand is high because internal tasks are using it?

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#95

Post by marcosdumay »

jopsen wrote: post #78
imtringued wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "liq…

> I would even go as far as to say that the production of liquidity is probably the driving force of the economy. Isn't that all what high frequency traders would say? :) Perhaps there is some limit at which additional liquidity doesn't offer much value?

I think you completely misunderstood the GP.

There isn't much there about stocks markets.

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#96

Post by myworkinisgood »

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.

As someone who worked for an compute time provider, I can tell you that the last people who can use the system for free are internal people. Because external people bring in cash revenue while internal people just bring in potential future revenue.

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#98

Post by dekhn »

jfengel wrote: post #35
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…

Is the electricity cost negligible? It's a pretty compute intensive application. Of course it would be a tiny fraction of the $10m figure here, but even 1% would be $100,000. Negligible to Google, but for Google even $10 million is couch cushion money.

The electricity cost is not neglible- I ran a service that had multiples of $10M in marginal electricity spend (IE, servers running at 100% utilization, consuming a significantly higher fraction than when idle, or partly idle). Ultimately, the scientific discoveries weren't worth the cost, so we shut the service down.

$10M is about what Google would spend to get a publication in a top-tier journal. But google's internal pricing and costs don't look anything like what people cite for external costs; it's more like a state-supported economy with some extremely rich oligarch-run profit centers that feed all the various cottage industries.

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#99

Post by lern_too_spel »

5kg wrote: post #97
jeffbee wrote: post #90

I think if you wanted to think about a big expense you'd look at AlphaStar.

I am wondering if AlphaStar is the most expensive paper ever.

"Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC"

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#100

Post by dekhn »

ape4 wrote: post #92
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…

Its like them running SETI@home ;)

We ran Folding@Home at google. we were effectively the largest single contributor of cycles for at least a year. It wasn't scientifically worthwhile, so we shut it down after a couple years.

That was using idle cycles on Intel CPUs, not GPUs or TPUs though.

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