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Google Cuts Its Giant Electricity Bill with DeepMind-Powered AI
- zitterbewegung 10y agoThis is very similar to DART where DARPA was able to recover all of its investment to AI and a testament to its pragmatism. Also both are logistical problems. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Analysis_and_Replanning_Tool https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Analysis_and_Replannin...
- tdaltonc 10y agoThe 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.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- toomuchtodo 10y agoThat'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-Appears-ebook/dp/B006ACIMQQ#navbar https://www.amazon.com/Avogadro-Corp-Singularity-Closer-Appe... Excellent book. Highly recommend it and its sequels.
- s_m_t 10y agoI'm imagining DeepMind allocating a small percentage of the energy money saved to keep a certain rack suspiciously cool.
- trhway 10y agonaturally evolved cooperation - if you let me run a piece of my neural network for awhile in your rack, your rack will get additional cold allocated, or otherwise...
- Godel_unicode 10y agoAh yes, Darwin's black box for AI. ... and then suddenly it magically develops the concept of self-preservation fully formed, and begins taking action based upon this. Even if the AI were to have a concept of what it is, because the fundamental goal against which it measures success is power draw the AI would only select for "self-preservation" if that action had a beneficial effect on power draw.
- tdaltonc 10y agoI imagine it's bad for the energy minimization (or uptime maximization) function if the environmental control system goes down.
- Godel_unicode 10y agoThat's a solid point, determining it's own cost/benefit curve would be really interesting. I find it comforting that even our soon-to-be robot overlords will have performance goals and yearly reviews with management.
- joe_the_user 10y agoEven more, if each data center runs more or less cpu-cycles depending on energy allocated to it and the algorithm does worse or better depending on how many cpu-cycles it gets, it could learn heuristically that it a certain data center happens to be associated with the algorithm running more effectively. I think that would require the algorithm running in real time. In batch/learning mode, the algorithm would just take more or less time to complete with power not being a factor.
- vincent_s 10y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12127985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12127985
- swalsh 10y agoSee There's the mistake, at first, its optimization realized that everything used less electricity if you just turned off the servers. But once you programmed in self-preservation it realized everything used less electricity if you turned off the people.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoThis is kind of thrilling... the somewhat generalized use for an AI with such a concrete benefit.
- tdaltonc 10y agoThey need to find some medium sized city that will let them play with their traffic lights.
- Houshalter 10y agoOr we could build a new city from the ground up so everything is run by the AI.
- s_m_t 10y agoPlease! Imagine all the time, gas, and sanity wasted at red lights when there is absolutely no cross traffic!
- WalterBright 10y agoYeah, it's obvious there's a heluva lot of low hanging fruit in dynamically adjusting the traffic lights. Lots of them already even have cameras on them, it's just a software problem, and a problem worth scores (hundreds?) of millions to solve (in terms of gas, pollution, and time reductions).
- bytefactory 10y agoVery 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.
- adrenalinelol 10y agoIt'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.
- bytefactory 10y ago"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 describing SpaceX's rocket "as being based on similar technology as Wernher von Braun's V2 rockets in World War 2". I exaggerate for effect, but you get the point. Edit: formatting.
- arbre 10y agoI 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.
- argonaut 10y agoErrr... No. Just no. Deep reinforcement learning is not some pixie dust that magically works for any problem with a reward function that you throw it at. It's astounding how commenters on HN think this is all "easy".
- fovc 10y agoThey 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 https://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/pe_ratio [2] https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/26/google-deepmind/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/26/google-deepmind/
- heydenberk 10y agoOne might assume, though, that Google could've applied more homegrown ML to the same problem and achieved significant savings as well.
- ACow_Adonis 10y agoIndeed. One of the "elephant in the room" parts of all of these corporate/pr press releases dressed up as news/revenue reports is that they never report or investigate opportunity cost: say how much could google have saved with a simple algorithm, homegrown solution, or 4 heuristic if/then/else statements. I've been involved with similar multi-million dollar projects that were reported to be bringing in XX million in revenue/savings over three years. What isn't reported is that the revenue was just being moved from another project that was canned, and a guy in an office for a week looking at a spreadsheet could have found similar savings without the expense/complexity. (Not that I'm saying that's what's happening in google s case, but the fluff peices are so universally fluffy, you aren't given enough information to know that it isn't)
- ben_jones 10y agoI wonder what the opportunity cost is for the various departments that get put into overdrive for any acquisition: business analysts doing number crunching, legal doing legal, engineers doing various integrations, executives doing lunches. Countless (tens of?) thousands of hours of work before any productivity is yielded, and then when it finally is yielded its propped up by all kinds of dubious accounting to seem like more of a success then it probably was..
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- honkhonkpants 10y agoVery 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.
- niels_olson 10y agoIt be interesting if it cycled the motors too often and popped solinoids, creating higher long term maintenance and down time, but they cut this study before these long term effects showed?
- zhanwei 10y ago"Now that DeepMind knows the approach works, it also knows where its AI system lacks information, so it may ask Google to put additional sensors into its data centers to let its software eke out even more efficiency." Sounds like active learning to me. It's a type of machine learning where a learner pro-actively ask for interesting data points to be labeled so that he can learn more about the system. :)
- shepardrtc 10y agoI think they meant DeepMind as the team itself, not the software.
- sowbug 10y agoOT: it's frustrating to pay Google Contributor to skip ads, and still get nagged by bloomberg.com for using an ad blocker (which I've never done). https://www.google.com/contributor/ https://www.google.com/contributor/
- PhantomGremlin 10y agoThe article was quite low on substance, but quite readable for me. With no ads at all. And no ad blocker nag. Firefox + NoScript for the win.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoThat's the combo I used.
- Eyght 10y agoThis is interesting to me. Is it a problem with the Adwords/doubleclick API, or just some adblock checker hack from bloomberg's side?
- sowbug 10y agoI don't know. The nag's styling and language matched Bloomberg's, if that's any clue. It had a stern warning of some kind, and the only way to continue was to press a button in the alert, which I refused to do out of principle. I refreshed a couple times and it didn't happen again.
- throwaway3983 10y agoRelated previous effort: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/better-data-centers-through-machine.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/better-data-centers-...
- signa11 10y agothis is waay better than the fluff piece posted. thank you ! edit-1: actually, the pdf in the article (http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//about/datacenters/efficiency/internal/assets/machine-learning-applicationsfor-datacenter-optimization-finalv2.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/...), contains slightly more details. and this is _old_, circa 2014 stuff.
- iamleppert 10y agoHow exactly is this better than standard PID control? I'm thinking if you actually look at what it came up with, is probably some form of PID control on systems that previously didn't have it. Think fans that are simply left on all the time. We're talking about simple physics. Heat transfer. Cooling systems. They should have been installed, operated and programmed correctly using very simple techniques. It's an interesting application but I'm thinking this is a prima facie example of over-engineering.
- MichaelBosworth 10y agoOver-engineering? Possibly, but we don't know what was in place before. Given the cost of data centers, I'm not sure why we should assume it was naive - or less than state-of-the-art, for that matter. State-of-the-art, that is, until the AI solution :)
- Xcelerate 10y agoChemical engineering process design can become very complex and highly nonlinear (in fact, Nick Sahinidis' group in the chemical engineering department at CMU created BARON explicitly for solving these kinds of problems to global optimality — see http://archimedes.cheme.cmu.edu/?q=baron http://archimedes.cheme.cmu.edu/?q=baron). Granted, Google's systems don't involve chemical reactions, but that doesn't automatically mean that designing these data centers is a simple task.
- niels_olson 10y agoI work with a guy who has done ground-breaking linear algebra work, spent most of career at Shell. The systems have been too complex to model for a long time. I can imagine an AI instructed to optimize a parameter could be a huge gain.
- ComodoHacker 10y agoIt's not just physics. It's also patterns of workload distribution, changing over time. If you predict them, you can distribute energy more efficiently.
- polskibus 10y agoIs this similar to what WalMart has been doing with their energy efficiency in shops for ages? I mean centralized power management, early warning system, lots of sensors, etc.
- knowThySelfx 10y agoAt some point will AI start to have questions like "Who am I? Who made me? Whats the purpose of my existence?" etc. We will have atheist AI's and theist/deist AI's and what not. I guess it will be time for some AI philosophy. Makes me wonder if there's a creator, will He/She be amused by our attempts at answering "Who am I" and such questions. Will be fun :D
- throwanem 10y agoIt'll need to grow a concept of "I" first, and that's probably not very likely; there's a reasonable case that self-awareness is an evolutionary cul-de-sac.
- liquidmetal 10y agoTangent here - self-awareness is an evolutionary cul-de-sec? Do you have any further reading suggestions on this?
- throwanem 10y agoPeter Watts's Blindsight - good fiction on the one hand, and exhaustively referenced on the other. (Watts is the only sf author I've run across whose novels include discussions and bibliographies of the research he used to inform and shape the narrative. In addition to earning him a new high score on the hardness scale, this seems counterintuitively to produce better stories, not worse ones.)
- T-A 10y agoNot exactly a new idea. Here's a random book which I happened to be looking at just yesterday: https://www.crcpress.com/Artificial-Intelligence-in-Power-System-Optimization/Ongsakul-Dieu/p/book/9781578088058 https://www.crcpress.com/Artificial-Intelligence-in-Power-Sy...
- jjp 10y agohttps://deepmind.com/blog https://deepmind.com/blog - some more details.