[HN Gopher] Reducing the Computational Cost of Deep Reinforcemen... ___________________________________________________________________ Reducing the Computational Cost of Deep Reinforcement Learning Research Author : theafh Score : 50 points Date : 2021-07-13 18:15 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (ai.googleblog.com) (TXT) w3m dump (ai.googleblog.com) | sxp wrote: | > 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 as more people take | advantage of the lower cost? | throwawaygh wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 | | 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 wrote: | > 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? | qorrect wrote: | > just trigger 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 wrote: | 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- | infrastruc... | DrNuke wrote: | 2016 GTX 1070s 8GB will live another day as the bang-on-the-buck | ml/dl/drl intro graphic cards then. | TaylorAlexander wrote: | Amazing that they fired Timnit Gebru [1][2] after she pushed back | against the removal of this very subject from one of her research | papers, [3] only to publish their own work on it without | mentioning her. | | [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/31/technology/google- | images-... | | [2] https://www.economist.com/science-and- | technology/2017/03/02/... | | [3] https://www.theverge.com/22309962/timnit-gebru-google- | harass... | aceon48 wrote: | "Fired" aka she said I'm resigning unless you meet my list of | demands, and they accepted her resignation. | monocasa wrote: | She said that they could discuss a possible resignation when | she returned from her preplanned vacation. They said don't | bother you don't work here anymore. | | Threatening to quit is no more quitting than threatening to | fire is actually firing. | igorkraw wrote: | I'm a bit surprised this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.05243 | wasn't in the citations, nor did the authors build on it | creato wrote: | One of the authors of that paper is acknowledged here, so at | the very least the authors were aware of each other before this | was posted. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-07-13 23:00 UTC)