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How much did AlphaGo Zero cost? (2018)

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Re: How much did AlphaGo Zero cost? (2018)

#81

Post by tasuki »

simiones wrote: post #63
elcritch wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be really interesting if a research group could calculate an entropic calculation on how efficient training any given neural network would be. As in what is the thermodynamic limit of the most optimal NN training could be in terms of watts per bit trained. My hunch would be that human brains would operate close to this limit. At least in our standard environmental conditions. Based on how near optimal biomateria…

I think the problem you'd find is that "bit trained" is probably highly non-trivial. For example, I expect that the training required to go from 7-year-old child to Go grand master requires a completely different number of bits of information than the training required to go from blanks-late NN to NN Go Grand master. I also suspect that the difference in what is being learned may well dominate the difference in train…

Can't help but remark that "7-year-old child" is not a valid go rank. Some 7 year olds are surprisingly good at playing go :)

Re: How much did AlphaGo Zero cost? (2018)

#82

Post by qayxc »

ipsum2 wrote: post #2

Alpha Go Zero*, which was trained from scratch, without human games. I've also heard rumors that AlphaStar ( https://deepmind.com/blog/article/alphastar-mastering-real-t... ) was essentially put on hold because it was too expensive to improve/train. The bot wasn't able to beat StarCraft champions and _only_ got to a grandmaster level.

The main issue is that they need to retrain their bots for each new map, which would mean excessive training every time the map-pool changes (e.g. every 3 months or so IIRC).

I'd even argue that they missed their goal by a long shot if their system isn't able to play arbitrary maps - every human player can do that no problem.

Re: How much did AlphaGo Zero cost? (2018)

#83

Post by qayxc »

ramraj07 wrote: post #59
trashburger wrote: post #14

The amount was removed from the submission title, which sucks if you're like me and don't like to visit yet another possibly JS-heavy site and drain your battery. For others: It's $36M.

Are you working off one solar panel on the way to Mars? First time I'm hearing battery drain as a reason to not visit a js site.

Phones. F'in phones man :D

Re: How much did AlphaGo Zero cost? (2018)

#84

Post by qayxc »

gridlockd wrote: post #40
tinco wrote: post #23

Our main compute doesn't go towards machine learning, but we do rely heavily on GPU power. I recently had to come up with the figures for us to invest in an expansion of our compute power, and it turned out that buying the machines ourselves would be cheaper than renting them from Google in 3-4 months. We don't run on those fancy V100 cards though, just regular old gaming cards suffice, and I suppose if we bought the…

How Google started out: Run servers from a shack, using commodity PC hardware How modern startups start out: Spend $50,000/month to run hundreds of microservices on a managed Kubernetes cluster

How else do you attract venture capitalists and convince them to throw millions at you? You need all the buzzwords and the latest tech ;)

I remember my last chat with one of such guys. They insisted that the company wasn't up-to-date because we didn't run our app inside containers and didn't develop our own AI/ML systems...

Re: How much did AlphaGo Zero cost? (2018)

#85

Post by qayxc »

nl wrote: post #76
simiones wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we have algorithms that allow bipedal robots to walk at human level ? Or run at, let's say, 10th grade standard student level?

Yes. Here's Boston Dynamic's robot doing Parkour and gymnastics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sBBaNYex3E It's not national level gymnastics but it's better co-ordinated than most humans.

It's not even AI - all the moves are a pre-programmed sequence. That's something Hollywood puppeteers could do 40 years ago...

Re: How much did AlphaGo Zero cost? (2018)

#86

Post by conistonwater »

qayxc wrote: post #79
conistonwater wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KataGo and Leela Zero and all the other AIs certainly didn't cost that much (the people running them wouldn't have had that much money and resources) and are probably stronger than Alpha Go Zero. I don't think it's at all fair to say this number is a good ballpark estimate of how much it would cost to replicate this experiment . It's wrong as a calculation of Google's costs, it's wrong per the title How much did Alph…

> KataGo and Leela Zero and all the other AIs certainly didn't cost that much And you base that claim on what exactly? Leela Go is trained by the community, which donates self-play resources. Just because you outsource your cost to volunteers doesn't mean it's free! In order to get to a realistic estimation, you'd need to get the average cost for electricity, hardware cost (proportionate to use), and of course opport…

Go is a small community, and there's just no chance they managed to donate $36M worth of anything, whatever the electricity and hardware costs, that's just too much money. KataGo's page says it was developed using resources donated by Jane Street, the company that its developer worked for; the general magnitude of numbers is also way off: sure they're a quantitative trading firm, but it's implausible that they'd donate $36M to develop a go AI.

Re: How much did AlphaGo Zero cost? (2018)

#87

Post by mafuy »

thomasahle wrote: post #77
29athrowaway wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think KataGo is stronger than Leela Zero. https://github.com/lightvector/KataGo

I was suspecting another boring clone, but Kata looks like a cool project with nice new ideas! Thanks for sharing

It is indeed independend and has a lot of nice ideas and theory contributions. It turned up after I stopped actively competing in computer Go, so I can't tell how strong it is. It certainly has a lot of potential and I'd probably pick it as a base to work from nowadays.

Re: How much did AlphaGo Zero cost? (2018)

#88

Post by MauranKilom »

Lucasoato wrote: post #8

> Each move during self-play uses about 0.4 seconds of computer thinking time. > Over 72 hours, 4.9 million matches were played. One of this claim must be incorrect or misinterpreted, I highly doubt they used so many TPU's as the article claims. That would be not only impractical but also it would raise a lot of other issues like networking, disk speed... etc... My statement is not against this article, if anyone can…

72 hours are 259200 seconds.

Playing 4.9 million matches of ~100 plies each at 0.4 seconds per ply is 196000000 seconds.

That's < 1000 TPUs. Sounds big but not too-large-for-google big. But other comments here say that the 0.4 second number is also wrong (and in fact significantly lower).

Re: How much did AlphaGo Zero cost? (2018)

#89

Post by qayxc »

conistonwater wrote: post #86
qayxc wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> KataGo and Leela Zero and all the other AIs certainly didn't cost that much And you base that claim on what exactly? Leela Go is trained by the community, which donates self-play resources. Just because you outsource your cost to volunteers doesn't mean it's free! In order to get to a realistic estimation, you'd need to get the average cost for electricity, hardware cost (proportionate to use), and of course opport…

Go is a small community, and there's just no chance they managed to donate $36M worth of anything, whatever the electricity and hardware costs, that's just too much money. KataGo's page says it was developed using resources donated by Jane Street, the company that its developer worked for; the general magnitude of numbers is also way off: sure they're a quantitative trading firm, but it's implausible that they'd dona…

The cost estimate was based on what what you and I would have to pay if we were to train AlphaGo Zero in 40 days on the given hardware using the reported number of games and resources.

Just replace the self-play TPU resources with commodity hardware or even just cheaper GPU compute providers and you'd reduce cost 10-fold by just not using TPUs. Same goes for the number of self-play games.

That still doesn't change the estimate itself. IF the other projects would've used Google TPUs, they'd well have been around the same cost as the estimate.

I really don't understand what you're trying to argue against here.

Re: How much did AlphaGo Zero cost? (2018)

#90

Post by mafuy »

qayxc wrote: post #79
conistonwater wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KataGo and Leela Zero and all the other AIs certainly didn't cost that much (the people running them wouldn't have had that much money and resources) and are probably stronger than Alpha Go Zero. I don't think it's at all fair to say this number is a good ballpark estimate of how much it would cost to replicate this experiment . It's wrong as a calculation of Google's costs, it's wrong per the title How much did Alph…

> KataGo and Leela Zero and all the other AIs certainly didn't cost that much And you base that claim on what exactly? Leela Go is trained by the community, which donates self-play resources. Just because you outsource your cost to volunteers doesn't mean it's free! In order to get to a realistic estimation, you'd need to get the average cost for electricity, hardware cost (proportionate to use), and of course opport…

Leela Zero used some commercial providers for training. Mostly, we used the free offers for new GCP/AWS/etc members, so it's only a certain fraction of course.

To provide an order of magnitude: There are about 20m training games. Iirc a V100 could complete one game in something like a minute. So that's 300k-ish hours of value. Obviously, while V100 were the fastest, other GPUs were more cost efficient.

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