[qayxc]

The cost estimate was based on what what you and I would have to pay if we were to train AlphaGo Zero in 40 days on the given hardware using the reported number of games and resources.

Just replace the self-play TPU resources with commodity hardware or even just cheaper GPU compute providers and you'd reduce cost 10-fold by just not using TPUs. Same goes for the number of self-play games.

That still doesn't change the estimate itself. IF the other projects would've used Google TPUs, they'd well have been around the same cost as the estimate.

I really don't understand what you're trying to argue against here.