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He probably does know about it because he seems he’s a well-read guy, but I think is too late for him and for people like him now: the pay they receive is too g

He probably does know about it because he seems he’s a well-read guy, but I think is too late for him and for people like him now: the pay they receive is too good for them to leave it all for some “principles” and on top of that I think the’ve also managed to acquire come cognitive dissonance traits that allow them to get out of bed in the morning and go to work without feeling guilty. Otherwise I cannot understand how he can really think that “more AI” is going to help with deforestation, as in “more AI” probably means less overall costs for bad people in the Amazon (where your major costs are people-related, it’s phisically very demanding cutting down trees in an Equatorial climate) which in turn means more trees being cut down. And this is just the beginning of it.

nl 7y ago
Jeff is right. Training a machine learning model for any common task is getting radically cheaper and more energy efficient. This is a combination of both better hardware (eg, Google TPUs) and better optimisation of training techniques (which is mostly done outside Google). Eg, DAWN Bench[1] benchmarks training of ReseNet50 to 93% accuracy. This used to take days. Now the FastAI group has shown you can do it in 18 minutes on 16 p3.16xlarge on AWS Spot instances. This is a huge energy saving. Huawei has shown you can do it on 16x8xV100s on their cloud in less than 3 minutes. [1] https://dawn.cs.stanford.edu/benchmark/ https://dawn.cs.stanford.edu/benchmark/
- paganel 7y ago
  “Energy saving” does not mean “cool, then we won’t use/consume that saved energy anymore”, it means “cool, now there’s more stuff for us to do/build with the same energy as before”. And more stuff to do/build means more pressure on the environment.
- aguyfromnb 7y ago
  Electronic computers have become vastly more energy efficient since they became widely used in the 60s. On net, do we spend more or less energy on computers now than we did then? That's the paradox. The cheaper energy becomes, the more uses we find for it.
- choppaface 7y ago
  Can’t wait for Cerebras. They can probably do an ImageNet in a couple seconds.
  - nl 7y ago
    I'll believe it when I see independent tests.
mkolodny 7y ago
From the article: > all the stuff we trained in our Google Data Center — the carbon footprint is zero. Because … basically, all of our energy usage comes from renewable sources.
- outside1234 7y ago
  ... which takes all of those renewable sources away from the rest of our energy consumption, so net net, their data centers cause more carbon.
  - dwaltrip 7y ago
    It's actually most likely the reverse. The more renewables are manufactured and used, they more they will be improved and made increasingly cost-effective, which will in turn make them more widely useful and competitive. It's a positive feedback loop. This is what we have been seeing the past 10+ years, and of the main reasons why renewables are starting to be directly competitive with fossil fuels in some regions, even without subsidies. This is a huge turning point that we are on the cusp of.

nl 7y ago

Jeff is right. Training a machine learning model for any common task is getting radically cheaper and more energy efficient. This is a combination of both better hardware (eg, Google TPUs) and better optimisation of training techniques (which is mostly done outside Google). Eg, DAWN Bench[1] benchmarks training of ReseNet50 to 93% accuracy. This used to take days. Now the FastAI group has shown you can do it in 18 minutes on 16 p3.16xlarge on AWS Spot instances. This is a huge energy saving. Huawei has shown you can do it on 16x8xV100s on their cloud in less than 3 minutes. [1] https://dawn.cs.stanford.edu/benchmark/ https://dawn.cs.stanford.edu/benchmark/

paganel 7y ago
“Energy saving” does not mean “cool, then we won’t use/consume that saved energy anymore”, it means “cool, now there’s more stuff for us to do/build with the same energy as before”. And more stuff to do/build means more pressure on the environment.
aguyfromnb 7y ago
Electronic computers have become vastly more energy efficient since they became widely used in the 60s. On net, do we spend more or less energy on computers now than we did then? That's the paradox. The cheaper energy becomes, the more uses we find for it.
choppaface 7y ago
Can’t wait for Cerebras. They can probably do an ImageNet in a couple seconds.
- nl 7y ago
  I'll believe it when I see independent tests.

mkolodny 7y ago

From the article: > all the stuff we trained in our Google Data Center — the carbon footprint is zero. Because … basically, all of our energy usage comes from renewable sources.

outside1234 7y ago
... which takes all of those renewable sources away from the rest of our energy consumption, so net net, their data centers cause more carbon.
- dwaltrip 7y ago
  It's actually most likely the reverse. The more renewables are manufactured and used, they more they will be improved and made increasingly cost-effective, which will in turn make them more widely useful and competitive. It's a positive feedback loop. This is what we have been seeing the past 10+ years, and of the main reasons why renewables are starting to be directly competitive with fossil fuels in some regions, even without subsidies. This is a huge turning point that we are on the cusp of.