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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

#151

Post by dekhn »

godelski wrote: post #150
dekhn wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I shouldn't have been so literal. I just mean it demonstrated solving something challenging in a convincing way, justifying a great deal of additional resources being dedicated to applying ML to a wide range of biological research. Not that it actually generates revenue or solves any really important health problems.

This comment is much more tempered and I do not think would generate a strong response. But I would suggest to take care when acting as an evangelical of a product. There's a big difference between "this technology shows great promise and warrants more funding as it won't be surprising if the benefits more than a decade's worth of losses at DeepMind" vs "this is a product right now generating billions of dollars a ye…

Just be aware, the person you're arguing with has several decades experience working on the problem that AlphaFold just solved, and worked for Google on protein folding/design/drug discovery and machine learning for years. When I speak casually on Hacker News, I think people know enough from my writing style to not get triggered and write long analytic responses (but clearly, that's not always true). Think of me as a lawful neutral edge lord.

Either way, AlphaFold is one of the greatest achievements in science so far, and the funding agencies definitely are paying lots of attention to funding additional work in machine learning/biology, so in some sense, my statement is effectively true, even if not pedantically, literally correct.

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#152

Post by dontreact »

ec109685 wrote: post #144
dontreact wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you but it also makes me think: Google's TPUs are also fixed costs and these research experiments could have been run at times when production serving need isn't as high.

They sell them on the spot market, so there’s someone that would consume the baseline compute.

I imagine it would never be optimal to set a price so low that utilization is always 100% externally

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#153

Post by godelski »

dekhn wrote: post #151
godelski wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is much more tempered and I do not think would generate a strong response. But I would suggest to take care when acting as an evangelical of a product. There's a big difference between "this technology shows great promise and warrants more funding as it won't be surprising if the benefits more than a decade's worth of losses at DeepMind" vs "this is a product right now generating billions of dollars a ye…

Just be aware, the person you're arguing with has several decades experience working on the problem that AlphaFold just solved, and worked for Google on protein folding/design/drug discovery and machine learning for years. When I speak casually on Hacker News, I think people know enough from my writing style to not get triggered and write long analytic responses (but clearly, that's not always true). Think of me as a…

> When I speak casually on Hacker News, I think people know enough from my writing style to not get triggered and write long analytic responses (but clearly, that's not always true).

If your "causal speech" is lying, then I don't think the problem is someone getting "triggered", I think it is because you lied.

> write long analytic responses

I'll concede that I'm verbose, but this isn't Twitter. I'd rather have real conversations.

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#154

Post by sigmoid10 »

injuly wrote: post #20
sigmoid10 wrote: post #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…

> This is calculation is pretty pointless and the title is flat out wrong. No, it's not. The author clearly states in the very first paragraph that this is the price it would take them to reproduce the results . Nowhere in the article (or the title) have they implied that this is how much Google spent.

They have changed both the title and the article since it was posted... almost certainly due to comments like these which used to be at the top. Though editing titles should be impossible imo. Editing comments is fine, but if you screw up titles you should be forced to resubmit and not be able to rug-pull an entire discussion.

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#155

Post by Rastonbury »

stairlane wrote: post #105
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…

> The only cost is then the electricity and used capacity. Not consumer pricing. So negligible. I don’t think this is valid, as this point seems to ignore the fact that the data center that this compute took place in required a massive investment. A paper like this is more akin to HEPP research. Nobody has the capability to reproduce the higgs results outside of at the facility the research was conducted within (CERN…

Kinda but Google sells compute so it makes money off the data centre investment, assuming they had spare capacity for this it's negligible at Google scale

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#156

Post by [deleted] »

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,…

[deleted]

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#157

Post by rowanG077 »

dekhn wrote: post #151
godelski wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is much more tempered and I do not think would generate a strong response. But I would suggest to take care when acting as an evangelical of a product. There's a big difference between "this technology shows great promise and warrants more funding as it won't be surprising if the benefits more than a decade's worth of losses at DeepMind" vs "this is a product right now generating billions of dollars a ye…

Just be aware, the person you're arguing with has several decades experience working on the problem that AlphaFold just solved, and worked for Google on protein folding/design/drug discovery and machine learning for years. When I speak casually on Hacker News, I think people know enough from my writing style to not get triggered and write long analytic responses (but clearly, that's not always true). Think of me as a…

Why would randoms on the internet be aware of your writing style in massive online forum. You aren't speaking from authority in this case, you can't compare it speaking at a conference for example.

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#158

Post by londons_explore »

dontreact wrote: post #152
ec109685 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They sell them on the spot market, so there’s someone that would consume the baseline compute.

I imagine it would never be optimal to set a price so low that utilization is always 100% externally

There is plenty of people who want cheap compute and are willing to wait till 3am if that's when the cheap compute is. Happens for all computing services, but for ML stuff the effect is even more pronounced because compute costs are typically a large part of the cost of many projects.

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#159

Post by pas »

godelski wrote: post #120

Worth mentioning that "GPU Poor" isn't created because those without much GPU compute can't contribute, but rather because those with massive amounts of GPU are able to perform many more experiments and set a standard, or shift the Overton window. The big danger here is just that you'll start expecting a higher "thoroughness" from everyone else. You may not expect this level, but seeing this level often makes you thi…

How does preregistration factor into this? It seems to me that it would make sense to do at least some review before the bulk of the money is spent.

> But you can be highly critical of a paper and that paper can still push knowledge forward.

Can you give a concrete example of this?

Re: Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

#160

Post by ramraj07 »

paxys wrote: post #93
ramraj07 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nope this is literally my estimate of how much the experiments cost for the paper alone (reagents, animals, and the labor for these experiments).
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