by 152334H on 7/30/24, 10:26 AM with 150 comments
by rgmerk on 7/30/24, 1:43 PM
My wife works on high-throughout drug screens. They routinely use over $100,000 of consumables in a single screen, not counting the cost of the screening “libraries”, the cost of using some of the -$10mil of equipment in the lab for several weeks, the cost of the staff in the lab itself, and the cost of the time of the scientists who request the screens and then take the results and turn them into papers.
by BartjeD on 7/30/24, 11:03 AM
It is rather unfortunate that this sort of paper is hard to reproduce.
That is a BIG downside, because it makes the result unreliable. They invested effort and money in getting an unreliable result. But perhaps other research will corroborate. Or it may give them an edge in their business, for a while.
They chose to publish. So they are interested in seeing it reproduced or improved upon.
by godelski on 7/30/24, 7:15 PM
I mention this because a lot of universities and small labs are being edged out of the research space but we still want their contributions. It is easy to always ask for more experiments but the problem is, as this blog shows, those experiments can sometimes cost millions of dollars. This also isn't to say that small labs and academics aren't able to publish, but rather that 1) we want them to be able to publish __without__ the support of large corporations to preserve the independence of research[0], 2) we don't want these smaller entities to have to go through a roulette wheel in an effort to get published.
Instead, when reviewing be cautious in what you ask for. You can __always__ ask for more experiments, datasets, "novelty", and so on. Instead ask if what's presented is sufficient to push forward the field in any way and when requesting the previous things be specific as to why what's in the paper doesn't answer what's needed and what experiment would answer it (a sentence or two would suffice).
If not, then we'll have the death of the GPU poor and that will be the death of a lot of innovation, because the truth is, not even big companies will allocate large compute for research that is lower level (do you think state space models (mamba) started with multimillion dollar compute? Transformers?). We gotta start somewhere and all papers can be torn to shreds/are easy to critique. But you can be highly critical of a paper and that paper can still push knowledge forward.
[0] Lots of papers these days are indistinguishable from ads. A lot of papers these days are products. I've even had works rejected because they are being evaluated as products not being evaluated on the merits of their research. Though this can be difficult to distinguish when evaluation is simply empirical.
[1] I once got desk rejected for "prior submission." 2 months later they overturned it, realizing it was in fact an arxiv paper, for only a month later for it to be desk rejected again for "not citing relevant materials" with no further explanation.
by pama on 7/30/24, 12:13 PM
[1] if the total cost estimate was relatively low, say less than 10k, then of course the lowest rental price and a random training codebase might make some sense in order to reduce administrative costs; once the cost is in the ballpark of millions of USD, it feels careless to avoid optimizing it further. There exist H100s in firesales or Ebay occasionally, which could reduce the cost even more, but the author already mentions 2USD/gpu/hour for bulk rental compute, which is better than the 3USD/gpu/hour estimate they used in the writeup.
by brg on 7/30/24, 4:57 PM
by jeffbee on 7/30/24, 2:59 PM
by hiddencost on 7/30/24, 8:13 PM
(A good rule of thumb is that an employee costs about twice their total compensation.)
by faitswulff on 7/30/24, 5:54 PM
by arcade79 on 7/30/24, 11:16 AM
From the link: "the total compute cost it would take to replicate the paper"
It's not Google's cost. Google's cost is of course entirely different. It's the cost for the author if he were to rent the resources to replicate the paper.
For Google, all of it is running at a "best effort" resource tier, grabbing available resources when not requested by higher priority jobs. It's effectively free resources (except electricity consumption). If any "more important" jobs with a higher priority comes in and asks for the resources, the paper-writers jobs will just be preempted.
by floor_ on 7/30/24, 12:04 PM
by hnthr_w_y on 7/30/24, 10:38 AM
by sigmoid10 on 7/30/24, 11:08 AM
That means Google payed way less than this amount and if you wanted to reproduce the paper yourself, you would potentially pay a lot more, depending on how many engineers you have in your team to squeeze every bit of performance per hour out of your cluster.
by dont_forget_me on 7/30/24, 2:45 PM