AI ethics research conference suspends Google sponsorship

Re:AI ethics research conference suspends Google sponsorship by jeffbee on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @10:44AM (#26329834)

Part of the issue in these events is that the paper that was written by Google's own ethics researchers simply repeats estimates of AI energy consumption from outside academic papers, instead of examining them. The reality is that Google's ML infrastructure is dramatically more energy efficient than the rest of the industry. A person with access to these facts who chooses to ignore them isn't really doing their best as a researcher, they're just grinding an ax.

There are other examples against the meme of AI using "a lot of electricity", for example a recent paper from Google where they show that a learned computational fluid dynamics technique uses only 2% the energy of standard techniques.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.01010.pdf

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Re:AI ethics research conference suspends Google sponsorship by dekhn on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @11:55AM (#26331081)

Not only are ML techniques finding ways to do physics with less energy, the amount of waste by non-ML computing absolutely swamps ML computing. I don't care if training a model uses the amount of CO2 that a translatlanic flight uses, because those flights are flying constantly, some of them not filled to the max. The whole criticism about energy in the paper seemed to miss major details that I'd expect top researchers to get right.

BTW, I ran a large scale computing platform at Google for several years. It made absolutely enormous, stunningly huge amounts of CPU available to scientists and we used it to make several important breakthroughs. However, after a few years, I finally was shown what the power cost implications were, and I shut down the project because the costs were not justified by the scientific benefits. Compared to what I was doing, ML is relatively skimpy on CPU.

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Re:AI ethics research conference suspends Google sponsorship by jeffbee on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @11:59AM (#26331147)

I'm not sure that your scientific facilities cumulatively spent as much CPU time as DeepMind spent playing StarCraft. If we want to talk about energy and ethics in machine learning I guess that's where I would start.

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Re:AI ethics research conference suspends Google sponsorship by dekhn on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @12:45PM (#26331882)

Yes, my calculations used far more time than DM, with the caveat that my jobs ran on CPUs while most of their training is on accelerators.

I believe we reported that Exacycle provided 700K high speed Xeon cores for over a year, and the actual number is far higher (I can't share it because you'd be able to make a reasonable estimate on how many computers Google has).

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Re:AI ethics research conference suspends Google sponsorship by visarga on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @01:49PM (#26332693)

> I'm not sure that your scientific facilities cumulatively spent as much CPU time as DeepMind spent playing StarCraft.

You gotta pay if you wanna play. Humans are the result of a much longer and more expensive evolutionary process. It's only normal to have to pay a little to do the same for AI.

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