4 ms·
The expensive bit is not the electricity, it's the cost of the GPUs, so they will train flat out. There is also a massive amount of competition between the var
by tomn 3y ago
The expensive bit is not the electricity, it's the cost of the GPUs, so they will train flat out.
There is also a massive amount of competition between the various players, and nobody taking part cares about the energy use (otherwise they wouldn't be doing it), so i don't see this happening.
(rough numbers: a H100 is 700W, which is $613/year at $0.1/kWh, and the estimated cost is $25000-40000)
- MacsHeadroom 3y agoTypical datacenter power cost is closer to $0.04/kWh. Datacenters mostly use renewable clean energy as well. Environmental concerns are deeply misplaced. 10 minutes of compute in a datacenter is far more environmentally friendly than 10 hours of work by a human.
- bee_rider 3y agoNice, we can just run the ML model—how do you put humans in suspend mode? Or do we just shut them off for now?
- tomn 3y ago> Datacenters mostly use renewable clean energy as well. Environmental concerns are deeply misplaced. Source? I didn't find much. Google talk about buying "carbon-free energy", which isn't bad, but ultimately just moves the carbon to other uses. Energy is also not the only resource being wasted. I also tend to think that the way people talk about energy use of technology is misguided, but ultimately data center energy use does likely form a significant part of my personal carbon footprint, which i care about, so it's quite reasonable to argue against finding new exciting ways to use energy when, to me, the benefits are so often unclear or negative. > 10 minutes of compute in a datacenter is far more environmentally friendly than 10 hours of work by a human. I don't think this is a good way of looking at it. Lots of things that a computer can do quickly would take a human much longer, but that doesn't mean they are good uses of resources. A better solution is to do neither, and this applies to a lot of what the article talks about.
- MacsHeadroom 3y ago>A better solution is to do neither aka "degrowth" That's a non-starter. Doing more is a given. The best we can do is to do more efficiently. Doing more with datacenters is the reason US economic productivity/output has soared in the past 3 decades while per capita energy usage has been stagnant.