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by gridlockd 2197 days ago
It is estimated to be 36 million for someone else to train AlphaGo Zero, assuming they use Google TPU instances and pay the sticker price.

Google isn't operating with that cost, unless we assume that they are prioritizing AlphaGo to the point where they lose such customers 100% of the time.

It's way more likely that AlphaGo is trained on spare time, the cost for the hardware is sunk anyway, so only the cost for upkeep is real.

1 comments

> It's way more likely that AlphaGo is trained on spare time, the cost for the hardware is sunk anyway, so only the cost for upkeep is real.

Not quite, power is quite expensive and basically all modern computers use far less power at idle than going full bore saturated with multiply-add instructions and perfect memory streaming.

Having said that, I agree that there is a substantial cost efficiency gain if they can schedule it during periods of inactivity.