They need to find some medium sized city that will let them play with their traffic lights.
Or we could build a new city from the ground up so everything is run by the AI.
Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI
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Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI
#12The next step, of course, is to let the AI know which servers in the server-farm itself is running on so that it can optimize for self preservation.
That's actually part of the premise in the scfi novel "Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears": https://www.amazon.com/Avogadro-Corp-Singularity-Closer-Appe...
Excellent book. Highly recommend it and its sequels.
Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI
#13The next step, of course, is to let the AI know which servers in the server-farm itself is running on so that it can optimize for self preservation.
I'm imagining DeepMind allocating a small percentage of the energy money saved to keep a certain rack suspiciously cool.
Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI
#14They need to find some medium sized city that will let them play with their traffic lights.
Please! Imagine all the time, gas, and sanity wasted at red lights when there is absolutely no cross traffic!
Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI
#15They saved "several percentage points" off of 4.4M MWh, so maybe 250M KWH, which might be $10-20M. At 30x earnings [1], they just made back most if not all of the purchase price of Deepmind [2] [1] https://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/pe_ratio [2] https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/26/google-deepmind/
One might assume, though, that Google could've applied more homegrown ML to the same problem and achieved significant savings as well.
Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI
#16[deleted]
Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI
#17Very light on details. What is the baseline of the savings? For example, was there a water pump that was always running at a fixed worst-case setting, and the machine learning system now ramps it up and down? If so, what is the marginal benefit over alternatives like a rudimentary closed-loop electronic control? Would like to know more about the system that was replaced, instead of these bare claims.
Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI
#18They need to find some medium sized city that will let them play with their traffic lights.
I've actually taken some sociology classes about this and the professor was a physicist who went into sociology and he used a lot of maths and modeling to tackle this problem in a local city. Unfortunately I do not have any data on this anymore but I remember it being surprisingly complex because human behaviour plays a big role, but there are massive improvements to be made with traffic lights, and so he did.
Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a shame too because one of the inhibiting factors of AI as complex as DeepMind is the fact it isn't cost effective due to its power consumption for quite a few tasks.
"In recent months, the Alphabet Inc. unit put a DeepMind AI system in control of parts of its data centers to reduce power consumption by manipulating computer servers and related equipment like cooling systems. It uses a similar technique to DeepMind software that taught itself to play Atari video games, Hassabis said in an interview at a recent AI conference in New York." This part really incensed me. That's like d…
I disagree. If you read the atari paper you will get plenty of details and you can infer how it is applied to electricity consumption. They were using reinforcement learning. The algorithms would learn to get a better score by looking at the screen and sending actions accordingly. Here you could imagine the same algorithm with energy consumption as a score, a set of datacenter metrics as the screen (state) and change of metrics as actions.
Re: Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI
#20Very frustrating read. Read more like an advertisement than an informative article. The claims made would've made for a very interesting tech-dive into a novel use of machine intelligence, but no details were provided.
they plan to publish more details in a research paper, AFAIK.