I don’t care how they estimate their cost in dollars. I think the cost to all of us in environmental impact would be more interesting.
The Extreme Cost of Training AI Models.
Submitted 4 days ago by 101@feddit.org to technology@lemmy.world
https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/33114.jpeg
Comments
mox@lemmy.sdf.org 4 days ago
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Unless they’re finding exciting new and efficient ways to generate electricity, I imagine its a linear comparison. Maybe some are worse than others. I know Grok’s datacenter in Mississippi is relying exclusively on portable gas powered electric generators that are wrecking having on the local environment.
downhomechunk@midwest.social 4 days ago
Gas like natural gas? Or gas like gasoline? I’m sure it’s the former, but I take nothing for granted anymore.
mox@lemmy.sdf.org 4 days ago
I didn’t know that; thanks for sharing.
(BTW, I think you meant wreaking havoc.)
linearchaos@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Maybe this is the push we need to switch to nuclear. The attack is good it just needs somebody with deeper pockets than coal/gas to lobby it.
OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
Honestly you can thank decades of anti-nuclear lobbying
Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de 4 days ago
I want to see what the long term economic cost was after they fired tens of thousands of tech workers hoping to replace us with AI. It feels like workers are always the ones who suffer the most under capitalism.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
It depends if they fire them and AI can’t actually do the job, then it would suck.
If they are fired and the ai can do it, then it’s great, it’s like having that many new people.
linearchaos@lemmy.world 4 days ago
They’ll fire more than that when the AI bubble busts and they stop pushing so hard into that development as it stagnates.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
Assume it is equivalent to burning 200 million $ of gasoline
linearchaos@lemmy.world 4 days ago
How in the hell is Gemini both two and a half times more expensive and vastly inferior to GPT?
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Some claim due to it was trained on too much data with too little intervention
postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Maybe we donnot understand what its objective function actually wants?
Maybe it is impeding its users intentionally.
PixeIOrange@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Google sucks
Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 4 days ago
Considering the hype and publicity GPT-4 produced, I don’t think this is actually a crazy amount of money to spend.
oce@jlai.lu 4 days ago
Yeah, I’m surprised at how low that is, a software engineer in a developed country is about 100k USD per year. So 40M USD for training ChatGPT 4 is the cost of 400 engineers for one year.
They say cost of salaries could make up 50% of the total, so the total cost is 800 engineers for one year.
That doesn’t seem extreme.my_hat_stinks@programming.dev 4 days ago
100k USD per engineer assumes they’re exclusively hiring from US and Switzerland, that’s not a general “developed country” thing. US is an outlier.
jacksilver@lemmy.world 4 days ago
This is just the estimates to train the model, so it’s not accounting for the cost to develop the system for training, collecting the data, etc. This is just pure processing cost, which is staggeringly large numbers.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
Comparitively speaking, a lot less hype than their earlier models produced. Hardcore techies care about incremental improvements, but the average user does not. If you try to describe to the average user what is “new” about GPT-4, other than “It fucks up less”, you’ve basically got nothing.
And it’s going to carry on like this. New models are going to get exponentially more expensive to train, while producing less and less consumer interest each time, because “Holy crap look at this brand new technology” will always be more exciting than “In our comparitive testing version 7 is 9.6% more accurate than version 6.”
And for all the hype, the actual revenue just isn’t there. OpenAI are bleeding around $5-10bn (yes, with a b) per year. They’re currently trying to raise around $11bn in new funding just to keep the lights on. It costs far more to operate these models (even at the steeply discounted compute costs Microsoft are giving them) than anyone is actually willing to pay to use them. Corporate clients don’t find them reliable or adaptable enough to actually replace human employees, and regular consumers think they’re cool, but in a “nice to have” kind of way. They’re not essential enough a product to pay big money for, but they can only be run profitably by charging big money.
huginn@feddit.it 4 days ago
The latest releases ChatGPT 4o costs $600/hr per instance to run based on the discussion I could find about it.
If OpenAI is running 1k of those models to service the demand (they’re certainly running more since queries can take 30+ seconds) then that’s 200M/yr just keeping the lights on.
Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 4 days ago
That’s a lot, but what’s their revenue?
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
bro who the fuck is google paying to do cloud compute for them? Google cloud??
ripcord@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I assume they’ve come up with some generic cost if someone was training each model using cloud compute.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
god i love accounting, it’s so much fun.
Wispy2891@lemmy.world 4 days ago
It’s obvious that Google didn’t pay the crazy AWS prices to train Gemini, seeing how many servers they have in gcp.
They mean that they used creative accounting to pay themselves crazy gcp usage bills to deduct from taxes?
FinishingDutch@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Geez, you’d think Gemini would be better than it is if they spent that much on it…
kromem@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Base model =/= Corpo fine tune
potentiallynotfelix@lemmy.fish 4 days ago
and gemini is still hot ass
pyre@lemmy.world 3 days ago
because this entire model of AI as an idea is garbage to begin with
Mwa@lemm.ee 3 days ago
trueee
hark@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Now imagine if they had to pay for the content they’re training the models off of.
_sideffect@lemmy.world 4 days ago
All a huge waste of money.
This isn’t ai.
It’s a “Smarter Search”
pennomi@lemmy.world 4 days ago
AI is a broader term than you might realize. Historically even mundane algorithms like A* pathfinding was considered AI.
Turns out people like to constantly redefine artificial intelligence to “whatever a computer can’t quite do yet.”
_sideffect@lemmy.world 4 days ago
No.
What I’m saying is what all these companies are presenting us is a smarter search.
It’s just a tighter grouping of (biased) data that can be searched and retrieved a bit quicker.
If they want to use the term ai, then hell, factory machines from the last century are ai too.
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 4 days ago
I hope you complained all these years when games used “AI” for computer controlled enemies, because otherwise your post would be super awkward
_sideffect@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Lmao, you have no idea what you’re saying.
Keep sucking up to these useless ai companies though, they love it!
ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee 4 days ago
It is AI though. AGI, which is a subcategory of AI and what many people seemingly imagine AI to mean, it’s not—but AI, yes.
bitjunkie@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Something was needed, tradsearch has sucked dick at anything other than finding a wiki article for an extremely broad topic for over a decade. Just make electricity sustainably. 🤷♂️
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Because it got enshittified, with SEO, ads, etc.
IndustryStandard@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Only 50 million dollars for gpt4? Cheaper than expected
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
The AI industry could stop right there, we won the jackpot already. They just need to stop while they’re ahead ! It is very unlikely that we will have as much as 1/10 the leap we have already seen.
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 4 days ago
How is Inflection-2 cheaper to train in the cloud than on own hardware?
General_Effort@lemmy.world 4 days ago
That probably indicates a problem with the estimates.
DaddysLittleSlut@lemmy.world 3 days ago
We must consider the benefits of AI as such and how they can contribute to our life. I can assure you prices of such while AI may seem like a game or useless thing for others. It’s actually a useful tool able to help others understand complex concepts that most people have a hard time explaining or won’t. Many more things too.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
If we assume this is already as good as it’s going to get and we don’t throw another 7 trillion into that fire.
For 100 million, a open source openweight release of gpt4 into the public domain will have been a good deal and releasing it into the public domain and preventing enclosure of our intellectual commons would make the enterprise as a whole a worthwhile endeavor.
DogEatWaffle@startrek.website 4 days ago
Humanity: develops nuclear fusion
AI:
IndustryStandard@lemmy.world 4 days ago
It’s like the south park “Now we can finally play the game” but for AI. First we get infinite energy and then we can train an AI to calculate how we can create infinite energy.
Soup@lemmy.cafe 3 days ago
All that shit needs to be just down and not revisited again.
todd_bonzalez@lemm.ee 3 days ago
I love this kind of delusional statement.
“Researchers spent tens of billions of dollars, and put decades into research, and now that there is breakthrough progress in applied machine learning, but we should bury all knowledge of it and abandon the entire sector because of vibes.”
Scepticism of AI businesses and hype is perfectly understandable, but you’re not putting this cat back in the bag…
Soup@lemmy.cafe 3 days ago
“It cost a lot, so it absolutely should be allowed!”
Is an even dumber excuse to keep it going.
breadsmasher@lemmy.world 4 days ago
The source didn’t have this detail - google training gemini “cloud” vs “own hardware”. Does Google Cloud not count as “own hardware” for google?
bjorney@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
That’s why the bars are so different. The “cloud” price is MSRP
pandapoo@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
This is an accounting trick as well, a way to shed profit, and maximize deductions, by having different units within a parent company purchase services from each other.
I realize that my two sentence explainer doesn’t shed any light on how it gets done, but ironically, you can ask an LLM for an explainer and I bet it’d give a mostly accurate response.
General_Effort@lemmy.world 4 days ago
From the source:
epochai.org/…/how-much-does-it-cost-to-train-fron…