5 ms·

> By doing so, in addition to reducing the environmental impact of our experiments... How does reducing the cost of individual experiments reduce the total env

by sxp 5y ago

> By doing so, in addition to reducing the environmental impact of our experiments... How does reducing the cost of individual experiments reduce the total environmental impact? Won't more efficient experiments (measured as experiments/Watt-hour or experiments/$) just trigger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox as more people take advantage of the lower cost?

throwawaygh 5y ago
Strikes me as one of those cases where good research uses a silly motivation to get brownie points. use p100s hosted in data centers powered by renewables, stop flying to conferences, don’t do drl just because it’s sexy
- monocasa 5y ago
  It reads to me as a response to Gebru's paper that led to her getting fired. A paper on the externalities of training large models, like the environmental impacts due to the large amount of computation required: "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?" https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922 That would explain why such a mundane subject is in a blog post, it's focused at tech news to be all "we really do care about this thing" rather than academia.
  - visarga 5y ago
    > Can Language Models Be Too Big? That's interesting, GPT-n with 100T parameters would be bored by just reading the whole internet. Too little information, repetitive and on average, junk. You can try the question in reverse too: Can evolution use too much energy? How much energy has it already consumed?
  - pas 5y ago
    It was not the paper that get her fired. (Probably there isn't just one ultimate cause that led to her firing, but maybe we can say that big G has a tendency to fire those who rock the boat too loudly.)
  - dna_polymerase 5y ago
    Why would they fire someone over this piece of shit paper? Does anyone think Google is threatened by the idea of AI using energy?
qorrect 5y ago
> just trigger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox as more people take advantage of the lower cost? I'm guessing that's exactly what will happen.
- melling 5y ago
  So, it really sounds like we need to reduce our carbon emissions for electricity generation. The windmills and solar are still on the way. Looks like the new goal in the US is 2035: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bidens-infrastructure-plan-would-make-electricity-carbon-free-by-2035/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bidens-infrastruc...
ackbar03 5y ago
Well I guess you get more bang for your buck/pollution

by sxp 5y ago

throwawaygh 5y ago

Strikes me as one of those cases where good research uses a silly motivation to get brownie points. use p100s hosted in data centers powered by renewables, stop flying to conferences, don’t do drl just because it’s sexy

monocasa 5y ago
It reads to me as a response to Gebru's paper that led to her getting fired. A paper on the externalities of training large models, like the environmental impacts due to the large amount of computation required: "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?" https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922 That would explain why such a mundane subject is in a blog post, it's focused at tech news to be all "we really do care about this thing" rather than academia.
- visarga 5y ago
  > Can Language Models Be Too Big? That's interesting, GPT-n with 100T parameters would be bored by just reading the whole internet. Too little information, repetitive and on average, junk. You can try the question in reverse too: Can evolution use too much energy? How much energy has it already consumed?
- pas 5y ago
  It was not the paper that get her fired. (Probably there isn't just one ultimate cause that led to her firing, but maybe we can say that big G has a tendency to fire those who rock the boat too loudly.)
- dna_polymerase 5y ago
  Why would they fire someone over this piece of shit paper? Does anyone think Google is threatened by the idea of AI using energy?

qorrect 5y ago

> just trigger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox as more people take advantage of the lower cost? I'm guessing that's exactly what will happen.

melling 5y ago
So, it really sounds like we need to reduce our carbon emissions for electricity generation. The windmills and solar are still on the way. Looks like the new goal in the US is 2035: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bidens-infrastructure-plan-would-make-electricity-carbon-free-by-2035/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bidens-infrastruc...

ackbar03 5y ago

Well I guess you get more bang for your buck/pollution