Comment on How does AI use so much power?
hisao@ani.social 3 days agoThat’s how llms work. When they say 175 billion parameters, it means at least that many calculations per token it generates
I don’t get it, how is it possible that so many people all over the world use this concurrently, doing all kinds of lengthy chats, problem solving, codegeneration, image generation and so on?
vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
that’s why they need huge datacenters and thousands of GPUs. And, pretty soon, dedicated power plants. It is insane just how wasteful this all is.
hisao@ani.social 3 days ago
So do they load all those matrices (totalling to 175b params in this case) to available GPUs for every token of every user?
vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
yep. you could of course swap weights in and out, but that would slow things down to a crawl. So they get lots of vram
hisao@ani.social 3 days ago
I also asked ChatGPT itself, and it listed a number of approaches, and one that sounded good to me is to pin layers to GPUs, for example we have 500 GPUs: cards 1-100 have permanently loaded layers 1-30 of AI, cards 101-200 have permanently loaded layers 31-60 and so on, this way no need to frequently load huge matrices itself as they stay in GPUs permanently, just basically pipeline user prompt through appropriate sequence of GPUs.