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I hope one day it will be possible to run this kind of models at home.
I was about to comment exactly the same thing. Stuff like this makes me feel so much behind because there's no way I can run this lol.
They hardware they mention can be rented from cloud providers. It’s just that it’s not very cheap.
Well, it used to be impossible to render on anything not a mainframe in a reasonable time.

The day will come when we will be able to.

When it will be possible to run this at home, the big companies will have models way bigger than this...
Or maybe the AI will own big companies that build bigger models for it. /s
If your disk has enough space to store the model, I think in theory you could run them, using the disk to store states. But it will be slow. I'm not sure how slow though, and also if anyone has implemented this. It actually should not be too difficult.
Disk makes no sense considering RAM is pretty cheap. But even then RAM is way too slow (and the communication overhead way too high). You probably get like a 100x slowdown or more.
I think you are overestimating compute and I/O for this model. If you assume it is RAM bandwidth bound, with a single channel top DDR4 you will get inference time as a low multiple of 7 seconds (200GB/25GBs). In a workstation you can have 8 channels.
12-channels in mine. 24-channels on some configurations, though I think that is the upper limit at this time, with a maximum density of 512GB per channel.
I think that unlikely. Barring some breakthrough that takes us beyond the limits of silicon.
Couldn’t the same thing be said about most things we do on our phones these days?

Won’t incremental advancement cover this eventually? (i.e. no major breakthrough required, just patience).

Speaking of which... I built a gaming PC a few years ago but I never use it these days. I want to install Linux on it and start playing around with machine learning.

Can anyone recommend any open source machine learning project that would be a good starting point? I want one that does something interesting (whether using text, images, whatever), but simple/efficient enough to run on a gaming PC and see some kind of results in hours, not months. I'm not sure what I want to do with ML yet, I just know I'm interested, and getting something up and running is likely to enthuse me to start playing and researching further.

My spec is: GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (11GB), a 24-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper, and 128GB RAM. I'd be willing to spend on a new graphics card if it would make all the difference. I am a competent coder and familiar with Python but my experience with ML is limited to fawning over things on HN. Any recommendations gratefully received!

I would recommend auditing Stanford courses in following order:

1. CS231n Machine Vision https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkt2uSq6rBVctENoVBg1T...

2. CS234 Reinforcement Learning https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgzM3zpZ55o&list=PLoROMvodv4...

3. CS330 Meta Learning https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rZtSwNOTQo&list=PLoROMvodv4...

Those will get you on track with general concepts about reasoning, AI engineering and concepts of learning itself

Language models for me a bit of headache because there're in different domain on intersection with linguistics and humanities but here's a good course

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rha64cQRLs8&list=PLoROMvodv4...

Those are all free and high-quality but require a lot of brain power

For those of us without 200GB of GPU RAM available... How possible is it to do inference loading it from SSD?

Would you have to scan through all 200GB of data once per character generated? That doesn't actually sound too painful - 1 minute per character seems kinda okay.

And I guess you can easily do lots of data parallelism, so you can get 1 minute per character on lots of inputs and outputs at the same time.

What about 250gb of ram and use a cpu ?

    $ dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1G count=250 status=progress
    $ chmod 600 /swapfile
    $ mkswap -U clear /swapfile
    $ swapon /swapfile
Is there a reason why it is required to fill the swapfile with zeroes here? Normally you'd see something like "dd of=/swapfile bs=1G seek=3 count=0", creating a file of size 3G but with no space allocated (yet). It's much quicker to complete the setup this way.
I assume if you force the file system to allocate inodes you are likely to have a less fragmented file than if you create a sparse file that gets inodes assigned over time when each part is used.
Which won't matter on SSDs
On all the benchmarks of SSDs I've seen they perform 1.5 to 4 times better on sequential reads than on random reads. That's a much better ratio than HDDs, but still enough to care about it.

You're also likely to get less write amplification if your swap file is continuous.

Of course with all the layers of indirection it's a numbers game, you don't know if your file system allocates adjacent inodes, and you don't know how your SSD will remap the blocks. But all else being equal, trying to make the file as sequential as possible seems preferable.

Interesting guess but wrong I'm afraid :)

It's simply because it's an easy way to create a file of a certain size that most Linux users would be familiar with.

The quicker way (and possibly more "proper" way) is to use fallocate, but who has even heard of that vs dd ?

If you bother to set the permissions, I suggest to do it in a way that doesn't leave a time window during which it still is unprotected (note that non-priviledged processes just need to open the file during that window; they can keep reading even after your chmod has been run). Also, not sure what the point of `-U clear` was, that's setting the uuid for the swap, better leave it at the default random one?

    $ ( umask 077; dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1G count=250 status=progress )
    $ mkswap /swapfile
    $ swapon /swapfile
Way too slow on CPU unfortunately

But this does make me wonder if there's any way to allow a graphics card to use regular RAM in a fast way? AFAIK built-in GPU's inside CPU's can but those GPU's are not powerful enough

I thought cuda had a unified memory system? Maybe I misunderstood
Unified memory exists, but it's not a magic bullet. If a page is accessed that doesn't reside on device memory (i.e. on the GPU), a memcpy is issued to fetch the page from main RAM. While the programming model is nicer, it doesn't fundamentally change the fact that you need to constantly swap data out to main RAM and while not as bad as loading it from the SSD or HDD, that's still quite slow.

Integrated GPUs that use a portion of system memory are an exception to this and do not require memcpys when using unified memory. However, I'm not aware of any powerful iGPUs from Nvidia these days.

Sure. Makes sense. So I guess for discrete GPUs the unified memory stuff provides a universal address space but merely abstracts the copying/streaming of the data.

There does seem to be a zero copy concept as well and I've certainly used direct memory access over pcie before on other proprietary devices.

https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-c-best-practices-guide/ind...

Slow, but is it still practical, like taking minutes to generate few words ca still be useful for testing or on certain low usage use-cases ?
Assuming running on CPU is memory-bandwidth limited, not CPU-limited, it should take about 200GB / (50GB/sec) = 4 seconds per character. Not too bad.
That's per token. And you can generate quite a few per pass.
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These models are not character-based, but token-based. The problem with CPU inference is the need for random access to 250 GiB of parameters, meaning immense paging and orders of magnitude slower than normal CPU operation.

I wonder how bad it comes out with something like Optane?

It's not really random access. I bet the graph can be pipelined such that you can keep a "horizontal cross-section" of the graph in memory all the time, and you scan through the parameters from top to bottom in the graph.
I wonder if you can't do that LSH trick to turn it into a sparse matrix problem and run it on CPU that way.
That's pretty much what SLIDE [0] does. The driver was achieving performance parity with GPUs for CPU training, but presumably the same could apply to running inference on models too large to load into consumer GPU memory.

https://github.com/RUSH-LAB/SLIDE

Fair point, but you’ll still be bounded by disk read speed on an SSD. The access pattern itself matters less than the read cache being << the parameter set size.
Top SSDs do over 4GB/s so you can infer in 50 seconds if disk bound.

You can also infer a few tokens at once, so it will be more than 1 char a minute. Probably more like sentence a minute.

You can read bits at that rate yes, but keep in mind that it’s 250 GiB /parameters/, and matrix-matrix multiplication is typically somewhere between quadratic and cubic in complexity. Then you get to wait for the page out of your intermediate result etc etc.

It’s difficult to estimate how slow it would be, but I’m guessing unusably slow.

The intermediate result will all fit into a relatively small amount of memory.

During inference you only need to keep layer outputs until the next layer's outputs are computed.

If we talk about memory bandwidth, it is space requirements that are important, not so much time complexity.

I have huge respect for developers at Yandex. It's kind of sad that achievements like these are tainted by the fact that they come from Russia (and I speak as a Ukrainian). I wonder if the permissive license is able to mitigate that.
The achievements aren’t in any way tainted by their nationality, citizenship, sex, sexual orientation, age, etc.
the age old question if the art should be linked or disconnected from the artist
and if technology is neutral.
This is nothing like that, because the question is not one of their own personal actions - but of their nationality or ethnicity. That, until about 4 months ago, would have been widely acknowledged as racism.

The difference between holding values, and holding values when convenient rather sums up the entirety of human history in one phrase.

Yeah, it's certainly about ethnicity, not at all about being controlled by a government which is in the process of perpetrating genocide.
I'm ethnically Russian (mostly), although I've never been to that country and have less influence on their foreign policy than your average European (who at least has some say in how his own country behaves towards Russia — and we've seen how well they managed that). I don't know how this would translate to the real world if I lived in "the West", but from what I'm seeing on the internet for the past few months, it definitely is about ethnicity. I've been called many things and blamed for everything bad that has happened since 1945, and not many seem to care that half of Putin's army consists of people of Asian and Caucasian ethnicities, and there are many Russians in the Ukrainian army. If you go to places like r/worldnews, there are open calls for violence that have strong fascist overtones, and those seem to be getting more popular.

Can't say the same about HN, it's one of the few places that seems to have kept its sanity (for now?)

How is your Russian ethnicity different from average Ukrainian?

But yes, there is, sadly, some discrimination. It's got nothing to do with ethnicity though; it's the same thing that happened to ordinary Germans in 1939-1945, and for the same reasons.

Well... I'm sorry if I reach for the reductio at Hitlerum, but any achievements Nazi scientists might have reached in concentration camps are definitely tainted. Similarly, achievements in the field of online consumer analysis in a country where consumer-privacy protections are nonexistent, surely should be considered tainted...?
I suppose the question should be: did the malevolence help in reaching the results?
They are and we use them all the same. Rockets fly almost every week now, jet engines are the most common form of propulsion, tons of medicine forcibly tested on innocent people is on the market, and to pass up any of that technology would be pure idiocy.
>tons of medicine forcibly tested on innocent people is on the market

What medicine?

That is why the US imported Nazi scientists in bulk to work in their labs. Starting with Wernher von Braun who had become the heart of the US space program. Soviets did the same at the time.

If you are so conscious about consuming tainted fruits the only way to escape is to be living on some deserted island catching your own food.

And Yandex's AI work got helped by the Russian invasion of Ukraine how, exactly? Did they train the bots on Ukrainian captives first?
Its developers stayed complicit with a company with a biggest propagandist pro-war resource in a country (Yandex News).
I'd guess they've been getting a whole lot more traffic lately, thanks to ban on Western services.
It's the other way round. It's quite possible that e.g. this model helped to spread Kremlin propaganda in various discussion boards.
Yandex search, which works on top of their AI is straight out propaganda machine for Russian government. Every time you go to yandex.ru, you're greeted with curated happy news about how Ukrainians are killing themselves, and russians are not fascists at all.

Their government does. They empower it. Just to be clear, it is their army, and their government doing the deed. They elected, they pay salaries to.

> consumer-privacy protections are nonexistent

And you can back this up how?

Wow. Yes you should have refrained from this. You are comparing Nazi scientists who killed many innocents to some software engineers working on a cool project and releasing it for free to the world.

What is your problem?

Just FYI regardless of your stance on any of the recent conflicts. De-humanization is a primary tool in information warfare these days.
> definitely tainted

Operation Paperclip...?

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Some people see it differently.
Coming from Russia doesn't mean you agree with government policy. If you saw people get arrested as soon as they start protesting, what would you do?
But as a company, they do. They are filtering alternative media from their search.
Not much they can do if the alternative is go to jail.
They're just following the law of their host country, like DuckDuckGo and Google have to... What's the alternative? Open rebellion against the state?
They've started to do so before the law was adjusted
Like Facebook, Twitter and every other forum did? I wonder if there were any consequences if they didn't.
No, they just removed all but pro-Putin or state media out of Yandex News. It's just only pro-war Kremlin propaganda now.
Basically they've taken a step further with censorship of all media not controlled by government which at the time (2014) couldn't been penalized whatsoever.
And what if they hadn't?
"Couldn't be penalized whatsoever" wasn't enough? In broader view, government could start taking hostages like they did with Google last December, but that wouldn't help reaching the goal even a small bit back then since there was no leverage on technical side of things.
> "Couldn't be penalized whatsoever" wasn't enough?

No, I think that's very naive.

> What's the alternative? Open rebellion against the state?

Yes. HTH!

To elaborate: At some stage, that becomes the only acceptable alternative; not doing so is morally culpable.

The world learned that in 1945, two ways:

1) "I was only following orders" was deemed not a valid excuse at the Nürnberg trials; not refusing orders like that is complicity; and

2) Germany as a whole was de-Nazified. Just like Russia needs to be now. (But more thoroughly: in Germany's case, it was an aberration of a dozen years; in Russia's, it's a millennium of unbroken history of totalitarianism.)

Too bad the world seems to have forgotten those lessons since then.

Yandex is under full control of Russian government. Pretty sure FSB can access anything.
Yes, similar to VK where low-level police can retrieve all of your location, messaging, IP data and sell it to mafia or thugs.

Russian police is notorious for selling logs, private data or access and also selling databases on a black market.

Genuinely curious: which media outlets are banned from Yandex Search? I just tried Meduza for example, comes up in search just fine.
Yandex has a news block right in the middle of its front page. Only "approved" news sources could be shown there. For people not specifically searching for recent updates on a topic or particular media outlets it represents the news. As far as I remember they wanted to remove this block instead of completely instead of censoring, but they were not allowed to. I think it was described in one of the documentaries about Yandex, but my memories are vague now.
I know, but the OP meant Search, not News. Google and even DDG can downrank certain news sources and I wouldn't be very surprized if Yandex did too, but I'd really like to see examples.
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Doesn't mean you can't be punished for the actions of the government though. See: Western companies and government pulling out of Russia or issuing sanctions on private individuals. I think it's even worse to say "we don't think you're guilty, but we do think you should be punished."
"We want to punish you" and "We don't want to make business with you" are two very different things IMHO.
If you go out of your way to not do business with someone, in order to cripple them economically, then it is a punishment.
If you want to define punishment like that, it is your call.

In my opinion it is not punishment to stop a relationship if the basis of that relationship was destroyed deliberately by one side.

I don't define it, it's exactly the official definition, like it or not:

> punishment: the infliction or imposition of a penalty as retribution for an offence.

Then you can play all you want with language to make it say what you'd like but it's pointless.

An "offence" as defined in a criminal code? Two countries don't share a criminal code AFAIK.
Why do I have to keep looking up dictionary definitions for you? And why do you keep playing futile language games? Spoiler: you are still wrong.
The purpose is deterrence, not punishment.
And yet sanctions never work as a deterrent. Cuba is still socialist after 60 years of sanctions. Great deterrent! No, sanctions just punish generation after generation of innocent people and serve no other purpose.

If you still mantain that the purpose is deterrence, then you must be a fool or worse, since it never works! Can't you learn from the past?

Edit:

Before you even dig out some article like this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/04/28...

I will make an important point: sanctions CAN work only to prevent something from happening. Once that happened, e.g. the war started, there's no sanction that can stop it and that's exactly when sanctions stop being a deterrent and start being a punishment.

And the fact that Russia is not capable of manufacturing tanks anymore has nothing to do whatsoever with sanctions?
> No, sanctions just punish generation after generation of innocent people and serve no other purpose.

They are pretty effective at preventing future wars. This war happened only because Russia wasn't crippled enough after 2014.

Obviously you have a much stronger opinion on that than I do, but at the very least, sanctions should deter other countries from acting in a similar fashion. For example, if — hypothetically — China is considering invading Taiwan, they will have to factor in that the Western world will stop doing business with them. If the West hadn’t put sanctions in place for Russia, that would lessen the concern for China. Maybe you think that isn’t worth it — that’s a valid personal judgement of course.
> Western companies and government pulling out of Russia

you can't really blame the companies for not wanting to be associated in any way with a nazist regime genociding a neighboring country.

And Starbucks or Mercedes pulling out of Russia isn't punishment. It is freedom of association and economic activity. Russians are whining about "punishment" because they have no idea about freedom, and that is them getting a bit of taste of it. They think they can plaster whole country with their swastika - "Z" - in enthusiastic support of the bloody genocide while the whole word shouldn't be able to express its disgust at those happenings.

Especially funny how Russians are cry-baby style whining about supposed violation of their property rights by the West sanctions while Russians have been violating property rights of more than 40 million of Ukrainians (even if we don't consider all the mass killing and raping of civilians that Russians have been doing there). The deep and profound disintegration of any morals in my old country is stunning.

>or issuing sanctions on private individuals.

due to the size of their wealth and the de-facto rules of economic activity in Russia those aren't private wealth of private individuals - they are integral part of that nazist regime, and thus they are guilty too.

And for the sanctioned Russian government officials - that is for example the Roskosmos CEO Rogozin, who is one of the main founders of the Russian Nazi movement "Motherland" (people from which has since taken prominent roles across the Russian government and the ruling Party) and who is one of the most prominent voices around Putin and the Putin's favorite, giving a Nazi salute and the end of his Nazi speech at the Russian Nazi march in Moscow. The specific phrase they all give Nazi salute to is "Glory to Russia!".

https://youtu.be/xkXVVcPWSU8?t=87

It was hilarious when people from Moscow wrote "they took away our ability to buy Chanel bags, so much for European tolerance!"

Not even seeing the irony. What did they expect in response to bombing, pillaging, mass rape? Friendly hug?

If I counted every time a NATO member committed worse atrocities but wasn't held accountable at all I'd probably stop after Ukraine is conquered.

What did they expect? Probably indifference, same reaction to any war crime committed by the west so far.

Say what you want, most people in Eastern Europe, Ukraine and even lots of people in Russia would prefer to be under protection of NATO.

If it were not for NATO, Russian rapists would already be in Tallinn, Vilnius, Helsinki. Claiming they were offended by historical injustices therefore women should be raped and men shot dead ("denazified").

> Say what you want, most people in Eastern Europe, Ukraine and even lots of people in Russia would prefer to be under protection of NATO.

Not the people in Donbass and Crimea apparently.

> Russian rapists

Oh please, quit the blatant Lyudmila Denisova propaganda. She was fired by your own government for all the falsehood she spread.

Unfortunately firing Lyudmila Denisova doesn't unrape all the victims of all those mass rapes by Russian soldiers in Ukraine. She was doing propaganda and Ukraine rightly fired her for that.

Russian soldiers have been shooting civilians at will (it is called "safari" in Russian army, and those Bucha streets - Yablunska and Vokzalnaya - with the bodies lying along the street is an example of such a "safari"). That would be an unique miracle in history if the soldiers wouldn't rape given such power in such conditions (for example those mass rapes by Soviet soldiers - 2 million of women were raped - back then in Germany in 1945 illustrate a result of such a power by the occupying force). And there is no miracle - just google Ukrainian rapes.

Just want to point out the mass rape claims were fabricated. Ukraine even fired Lyudmila Denisova over the ordeal:

https://greekcitytimes.com/2022/06/01/ukrainian-official-fir...

No, there are credible and quite horrifying reports[1]. Also some of the actual rapists were found out and victimes stepped forward. Please don't spew Russian propaganda.

[1] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/04/18/i-can-do-whatever-i-...

How is it Russian propaganda? It's been widely reported by western sources that Denisova was fired by Ukrainian officials for lying specifically about the mass rape claims.

I'm not suggesting there have been no rapes or that Russians are the good guys. Just that the reports of mass rapes were fabricated (Denisova admitted she thought it would help Ukraine obtain more sympathy and weapons from the west).

They might as well agree with it. Or agree with some of it. It just strikes me how everyone wants to put everyone else into these well-defined black-and-white boxes. I get that it’s simpler, but it’s often at odds with reality.
>"It just strikes me how everyone ..."

Because most of those "everyone's" are not facing the choices themselves and are basically keyboard warriors. Let's see what they say when they'll be asked to sacrifice their own well being to be on a "high moral ground".

I think we're already seeing that in recent French elections. I have a feeling this is only the beginning.

As a relatively neutral party in all of this whose country hasn't tainted itself (but who nevertheless spent all my live under a similar autocracy), I can't help but shake my head at keyboard revolutionaries who definitely would have overthrown the regime, if only they lived in Russia. You just have no freaking idea what you're talking about. Guard your democracy as best you can so you don't have to find out.

> Guard your democracy as best you can

If you look at Snowden and Assange, that ship has sailed.

I am asking this question myself for 120 days and I still don't have an answer.
Maybe not be "apolitical" for 20 years that led to this?

Russian IT and media were showered with relatively high wages to stay quiet while last semblance of elections was finally destroyed, independent media was took over by pro-Putin oligarchs and activists were crushed or murdered.

As was the sarcastic saying coined recently, "if you are apolitical then bullets don't hit you".

> If you saw people get arrested as soon as they start protesting, what would you do?

Probably move if that's anywhere near a possibility, and if not, cowardly stay as unnoticeable as possible. I know that at least in Finland Russian refugees are mostly welcome (although the border might be closed right now), even if they probably will face a lot of scrutiny from various authorities for obvious reasons. Most certainly it's nothing like the attention such people would face in Russia.

We fondly remember even the smallest acts of defiance that ordinary Germans acted out against their regime during 1933-1945. We all would like to be those people in times of crisis, but obviously most of us are not. They were probably ultimately pretty futile acts during that time, though, but put together with all the other actions that happened against the Nazis played a significant grander role. And we know that more than a few significant Jewish scientists and engineers fled from Nazi Germany and made significant contributions to the war effort. For instance, one guy called Einstein.

It would probably fit better to compare "small actions" to the people of the DDR which were protesting against their regime and ultimately helped to bring it down.
Move where, exactly? I have a few friends in Russia and they sit on their asses because there's nowhere for them to go. You don't exactly qualify as a refugee unless the state is after you (which you can trigger very easily, but then you may not be able to leave the country), and even then it's not a given.
Yandex is arguably the biggest censoring and propaganda machine in Russia.

Yandex News is IIRC the biggest news media in Russia.

It filtered all results on protests and opposition resources leaving only government propaganda. Same with war. Filtering not meaning downranking. Just straight up not showing.

Editors were fired for not staying in line until it was completely sterilized and filled with pro-war propaganda.

Working in Yandex is being complicit with it.

This is a stupid argument. Ukrainians are being killed and you compare that to fear of being arrested? It's a nice excuse. "Oh yes I don't support my government, but you know these arrests, I'd rather stay in my cosy home and enjoy my tea. Now could you please lift the sanctions? I already said I don't support my government, why normal people like me should suffer?" etc etc
>""Oh yes I don't support my government, but you know these arrests, I'd rather stay in my cosy home and enjoy my tea."

Why are you so surprised? This is exactly how most of the population behaves everywhere. People go about their business and "support" criminal actions of their governments all the time. This includes the West. Our governments have no problems exterminating, starving and displacing people (as long as they're the "right" people to mess with) while the majority of the population is going on merrily about their business. And Europe keeps buying Russian stuff even now while "Ukrainians are being killed". Where are the mass protests and fights with the police?

Things might change when "messing" with people will ALWAYS have the consequences for ANY country. But this is not what is happening and is unlikely to change. We have no extra terrestrial entity to police us in impartial way.

> Our governments have no problems exterminating, starving and displacing people

It's high time to bring "but US bombed Iraq". Classic playbook.

And yet it is still true.
Americans just love to talk about themselves. Who cares about Russians under Putin's oppression or Ukrainians being exterminated. Let's talk about your government, Bush, Trump and Google.
This is not true. I can assure you that tons of Muslims and people from the middle east also care about the fact that the same actors who gleefully engineered wars on terror that led to a million people dying and entire countries getting devastated, with absolutely 0 consequences for them, are now so very keen to hold other people accountable for illegitimate invasions.

No one likes hypocrisy, especially when it is coming from the same westerners that at most protested for a few weeks back in 2003 when their own countries bombed us for 2 decades, that are now calling for other people to get arrested and possibly tortured/executed by putin's regime because that's just the right thing(tm) to do to stop the war. It would be laughable if it wasn't despicable.

It is as classic as your own standard script. I've just explained what is going on. I did not want to single out the US as it happens everywhere. But if you are so touchy maybe you should not have "supported" that particular subject. Remind me what was your punishment?
Yeah, by being arrested you're doing so much more for the Ukrainians
More people having to deal with prisoners, potentially fewer people going to Ukraine. Certainly better than doing nothing.
Wait until you hear about the folks your country is killing!
Yes posting that Wikipedia link isn't a magic way to deflect from the fact that the iraq war led to a million people dead. And that people are still dying from the war on terror. It's amazing that you just said that people in ukraine are still dying, and that just saying that you don't support your government from the comfort of your couch isn't enough... and then you proceeded to link an article specifically so that you can ignore/deflect the deaths that are also happening now and that should be (according to your own argument) much more important than any of your own comfort or even liberty?

"Yes hundreds of thousands of Muslims died and are still dying, but bringing it up or asking me to do anything about is fallacious! Checkmate"

As you said, who cares about debate tricks when people in the middle east are still dying from the war on terror as we spead? Why are you holding other people to standards that you don't even pretend to hold yourself to? You are expecting people to get arrested to prevent deaths and talk about the situation in ukraine, but I guess making you uncomfortable with "whataboutism" is the limit?

Every russian citizen pays for death and destruction in Ukraine. With taxes, with national wealth.

What should russians do you ask? Fight. I did it in Ukraine in 2004. Then in 2014. I didn't run from cops, I didn't let them take my friends. But regardless, now we pay with our lives, being subjected to genocide because of russian cowardliness.

because so far they are all just paying for the genocide.

The achievements cannot be tainted.

Kolmogorov complexity is (I hope) untainted.

Also, Hilbert’s problems are not untainted (and he never flew Nazi Germany!).

I think the correct word might be fled -> he never fled.
Are American developers’ achievement tainted by the fact they come from the United States?
Underrated comment, considering the history of NATO expansion, color revolutions and the hundreds of thousands killed in pursuit of reckless ideological overt or covert warfare.
Some of them, like the invasive analysis tools that exploit the Patriot Act, yes for sure.
Often, yes. In many places we're even wary of using US-based services at all. The EU has been having a bit of a back and forth with the US and many companies because EU law prohibits foreign states gaining access to personal information whereas US law requires foreign personal information transfers to CC the NSA on request. There's some big legislative deadlocks where American companies simply cannot operate fully in countries other than the US because the US laws require wild violations of basic rights to privacy of anyone who isn't a US citizen.

Lots of things have to be cleared for backdoors, Intel and AMD are scary with their built-in ME and whatever AMD had, I can't exactly remember, proprietary hardware in general is very scary outside the US due to surveillance and possible backdoors, it's kind of weird. Same goes for China, though they don't surveil foreigners exactly as hard, at least here they don't. It's not exactly an ideal situation and I think there should be agreements done internationally on stuff like this to keep the US and China out of our devices or allowing them to kindly fuck off entirely.

Not exactly the same kind of taint though, your products aren't as much morally tainted as they are simply dangerous to use, like little telescreens you have to carry around.

Yeah. US developers might create great software but due to the Cloud Act, Patriot Act and whatnot you don't want to use it for anything that's not public data at first. It's just not protected against unauthorized access.
What percentage of American inventions and scientific developments post WW2 were led or influenced by former Nazi scientists?
Probably about same as share as of USSR's. They just were open about it. Also, crucial word here is "former". Like, there is a big difference between being of a former fascist state, and carrying on ongoing genocide.
I have to wonder if 10 years down the line, everyone will be able to run models like this on their own computers. Have to wonder what the knock-on effects of that will be, especially if the models improve drastically. With so much of our social lives being moved online, if we have the easy ability to create fake lives of fake people one has to wonder what's real and what isn't.

Maybe the dead internet theory will really come true; at least, in some sense of it. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-...

> I have to wonder if 10 years down the line, everyone will be able to run models like this on their own computers.

Isn’t that already the case? Sure, it costs $60K, but that is accessible to a surprisingly large minority, considering the potency of this software.

...what? 60 thousand dollars for a dedicated computer that you can't use is not everyone, not on their own computers, and is also a crazy large amount of money for nearly everyone. Sure there are some that could, but that's not what I said.
Indeed. What "everyone" can use is a ~$200 smartphone, so there's a ~300x gap to be bridged.
log(300) / log(2) = only 8.2 doublings away. That's near future material.
Maybe at 90s hardware growth rates, but not now.
The dream of the 90s is alive in the GPU market: https://aiimpacts.org/2019-recent-trends-in-gpu-price-per-fl...

Moore's law didn't stop, just Dennard scaling. Expect graphics and AI to continue to improve radically in performance/price, while more ordinary workloads see only modest improvements.

GPU TDP seems on the verge of going exponential, cost per transistor isn't really decreasing so much at the very latest nodes, and even that article seems to suggest it'd likely be decades before 300x flops/$
Most of the cost of a phone isn’t the processor, so probably closer to x1000. Hardware may get that much cheaper, but it was never guaranteed, and we’re not making progress as fast as we used to.
Plus, that's the energy costs involved when running a computer now worth 60k, I'm pretty sure that in the current socio-economic climate those power costs will surpass the initial acquisition cost (those 60k, that is) pretty easily.
An 80GB nvidia A100 goes for $20k and uses 300 watts, the energy costs of using one (or three) isn’t going to surpass the hardware costs for… a while.
I wanted to add that I was writing it metaphorically in a way, as in, seeing as how high those energy bills will be they might as well all add up to 60k.

Not sure about most of the people in here, but I would get really nervous at the thought of running something that eats up 3x300 watts per hour, for 24/7, just as part of a personal/hobby project. The incoming power bills would be too high, you have to be in the wage-percentile for which dropping 60k on a machine just to carry out some hobby project is ok, i.e. you’d have to be “high-ish” middle-class at least.

The recent increases in consumer power prices are a heavy blow for most of the middle-class around Europe (not sure about how things are in the States), so a project like this one is just a no-go for most of middle-class European programmers/computer people.

At full power 3 of those would cost me ~$3.50 per day ($0.15 per kWh is what I paid for last month's electricity, though I could pay less if I made some difference choices), I occasionally have a more expensive coffee order, or have a cocktail worth three times as much.

Things are getting more expensive here but nothing like the situation in Europe (essentially none of our energy was imported from Russia, historically ~10% of oil imports but that was mostly to refine and re-export, we have all the natural gas locally that we need) The US crossed the line into being a net hyrdocarbon energy exporter a while ago (unsure what the case is recently but it is at worst about at parity)

You must not have a pool :)
Eh, 60k is just a bit more expensive than your average car, and lots of people have cars, and that's just how things are today. I imagine capabilities will be skyrocketing and prices will fall drastically at the same time.
> 60k is just a bit more expensive than your average car

If by "A bit" you mean about 30-40k

> > 60k is just a bit more expensive than your average car

> If by "A bit" you mean about 30-40k

30k more expensive: Than your very-low-end-"average" car.

40k more expensive: Than your average used car.

AFAICS. All in what one sees as an "average" car, I suppose.

You're grossly overestimating. People who make 60k annually are getting a bit rarer nowadays, it's not like everyone can afford it. For the majority of people it'd be a multi-decade project, for a few it might only take 7 years, very few people could buy it all at once.
Nitpick: This uses 8x A100 which are at least $10k a piece to my knowledge. Add in the computer and you're closer to $100k.
And also, NVIDIA does not sell them to the consumer market whatsoever. Linus Tech Tips could only show one because someone in the audience sent theirs over for review.
I believe you're confusing the amount of A100 graphics cards used to train the model (the cluster was actually made up of 800 A100s), and the amount you need to run the model :

> The model [...] is supposed to run on multiple GPUs with tensor parallelism.

> It was tested on 4 (A100 80g) and 8 (V100 32g) GPUs, [but should work] with ≈200GB of GPU memory.

I don't know what the price of a V100 is, but given $10k a piece for A100s we would be closer to the $60k estimate.

The $10k price is for an A100 with 40GB ram, so you need 8 of those. If you can get your hands on the 80GB variant, 4 are enough.

Also, if you want to have a machine with eight of these cards, it will need to be a pretty high-spec rack-mounted or large tower. To feed these GPUs, you will want to have a decent amount of PCIe-4 lanes, meaning EPYC are the logical choice. So that's $20k for an AMD EPYC server with at least 1.6kw PSUs etc etc.

Do you happen to know the cost of the 80GB variant?
The PNY variant is pretty much the only one you can try to buy as an individual part, and those go for ~$15k. If you can get them.

Note that A100 like other datacenter GPUs are passively cooled. You need a strong airflow and duct in any case that would house them.

There is also $5k A6000 with 48GB
Which will work just fine with NVIDIA SWITCH and a decent GPU compute case from ASUS or IBM or even building your own out of an off-the-shelf PCIe switch and consumer motherboard.
You don't need a "decent amount" of PCIe-4 lanes. You just need 16 of them. And they can be PCIe 3.0 and will work just fine. Deep learning compute boxes predominantly use a PCIe switch. e.g. the ASUS 8000 box, which handles eight cards just fine. You only need a metric tonne of PCIe bandwidth if you are constantly shuttling data in and out of the GPU, e.g. in a game or exceedinyl large training sets of computer vision data. A little latency of a few hundred milliseconds moving data to your GPU in a training session that will take hours if not days to complete is neither here nor then. I suspect this model, with a little tweaking, will run just fine on an eight way RTX A5000 setup, or a five-way A6000 completely unhindered. That puts the price around $20,000 to $30,000. If I put two more A5000s in my machine, I suspect I could figure out how to get the model to load.

It also sounds like they haven't optimized their model, or done any split on it, but if they did, I suspect they could load it up and have it infer slower on fewer GPUs, by using main memory.

You could just run this on a desktop CPU, there's nothing stopping you in principle, you just need enough RAM. A big memory (256GB) machine is definitely doable at home. It's going to cost 1-2k on the DIMMs alone, less if you use 8x32GB, but that'll come down. You could definitely do it for less than $5k all in.

Inference latency is a lot higher in relative terms, but even for things like image processing running a CNN on a CPU isn't particularly bad if you're experimenting, or even for low load production work.

But for really transient loads you're better off just renting seconds-minutes on a VM.

From the readme, it looks like you need that RAM on your GPU.
There isn't any reason you can't run a neural net on a CPU. It's still just a bunch of big matrix operations. The advantage of the GPU is it's a lot faster, but "a lot" might be 1 second versus 10 seconds, and for some applications 10 seconds of inference latency is just fine (I have no idea how long this model would take). All the major ML libraries will operate in CPU-only mode if you request it.
They are pretty slow even on GPU. The problem is that it's an autoregressive model. So it needs to do a forward pass for each token.
What kind of computer would they be?

Can you spec it out roughly?

It could be possible with analog chips. I.e. ones that Mythic works on.
I'm not sure why you got downvoted. Yes, ASICs (either analog or digital) that have some model hardcoded in would probably make it feasible, but it won't be programmable which is the interesting part.
Totally not my field, but why wouldn't they be programmable? Analog FPGA's already exist.
Yes, true. I was referring to the Mythic ones the other comment mentioned which are only for inference of a specific model.
I know it's a sort of exaggerated paranoid thought. But like these things do all come down to scale and some areas of the world definitely could have the amount of compute available to make dall-e level quality full scale videos which we might be consuming right now. It really does make you start to wonder at what point we will rationally be able to have zero trust that not everything we watch online is fabricated.
Historically, hard-to-falsify documents are an anomaly, the norm was mostly socially conditional and enforced trust. Civilizations leaned and still lean on limited-trust technologies like personal connections, word of mouth, word on paper, signatures, seals, careful custody etc. I agree losing cheap trust can be a setback, just want to point out we’re adaptable.
> one has to wonder what's real and what isn't.

And whether it really matters. That's the bigger question.

I think, for most of us, it does matter. But we're not sure why and what a loss of human reality would really mean.

For a few who wholeheartedly embrace it there's some resonance with the psychedelic/60s creed that sees this as some kind of "liberation".

If by running models you mean just the inference phase, then even today you can run large family of ML models on commodity hardware (with some elbow grease, of course). The training phase is generally the one not easily replicated by non-corporations.
That's definitely the future, personalized entertainment and social interactions will be big. I could watch a movie made for me, and discuss it with a bunch of chat bots. The future will be bubbly as hell, people will be decaying in their safe places as the hellscape rages on outside.
I get the feeling that creative sci fi used to kind of help inoculate us against these kinds of future but it seems like there's much less of it than there used to be.

"Black mirror" was good but it's not nearly enough.

You really dont want to live in Mindwarp (1992 Bruce Campbell movie) or in this !114! year old short story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
The Machine Stops is eerily prescient - or perhaps just keenly observant of trends visible even at the time - but in fairness the humans in it are not socially isolated, as such; they do not converse with bots, but rather with each other. The primary social activity in the The Machine Stops is the Zoom meeting.

I do not look forward to the day when that story becomes an optimistic view of the future.

That story is already an optimistic view compared to our own: They have no ads
> I could watch a movie made for me

We're a long, long way from this. Stringing words/images together into a coherent sequence is arguably the easy bit of creating novels/films, and computers still lag a long way behind humans in this regard.

Structuring a narrative is a harder, subtler step. Our most advanced ML solutions are improving rapidly, but often struggle with coherence over a single paragraph; they're not going to be doing satisfying foreshadowing and emotional beats for a while.

We're probably a long way away from narrative, but dall-e for video is probably only a year or two away from now (they're probably training the model as we speak).
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For many movies, sure.

I'm pretty sure the Marvel franchise is shat out by an algorithm.

You jest, but it really is the case. When your movie has a goddamn board of directors, you can be 100% sure it will be A/B tested until it transmutes the surrounding air into gold.
> We're a long, long way from this.

We’re probably 18 months away from this. We’re probably less than 5 years away from being able to do this on local hardware. AI/ML is advancing faster than most people realise.

Maybe. But I think a lot of folks have a short term memory; it was not so long ago that Word2Vec and AlexNet were SOTA. Remember when the thought of a human besting a world-class player at Go was impossible? Me too.

We've come ludicrously far since then. That progress doesn't guarantee that innovation in the space will continue at its current pace, but it sure does feel like it's possible.

> Structuring a narrative is a harder, subtler step.

You can say that about many movies/series made entirely by humans today. :)

I actually wouldn't be surprised if the technology catches up to this faster than we realize. I think the actual barrier to large scale adoption of it will be financial and social incentives.

A big reason all the major studios are moving to big franchises is that the real money is in licensing the merch. The movies and TV shows are really just there to sell more merch. Maybe this will work when we all have high quality 3d printers at our desks and we can just print the merch they sell us.

The other big barrier is social. A lot of what people watch, they watch because it was recommended to them by friends or colleagues, and they want to talk about what other people are talking about. I'm sure that there will be many people who will get really into watching custom movies and discussing those movies with chatbots, but I bet most people will still want to socialize and discuss the movies they watch with other humans. FOMO is an underestimated driver of media consumption.

I don’t know for you, but most of my online interactions are text based. Context of interpretation matter far much than the form of the content. If you know it’s easy to fake text exchanges, you might be more careful about text origin, and other contextual hints. Even it’s the syntax imitate your children verbal oddities, you may not necessarily run to comply thoughtlessly to an unusual demand you just receive by SMS from their phone number. Trust and check.
I'm predicting that the upcoming Mac Pro will be very popular among ML developers, thanks to unified memory. It should be able to fit the entire model in memory.

Combine that with the fact that PyTorch recently added support for Apple silicon GPUs.

upcoming mac pro will have pretty poor ML performance when compared to even an old nvidia gpu sadly.
Although memory capacity may matter more than speed for inference. As long as you're not training or fine tuning, the mac pro / studio may be just fine.

apart from the fact that you can't use any of the many nvidia-specific things; if you're dependent on cuda, nvcuvid, AMP or other things that's a hard no.

What are the current best ML language models to play with on the M1Max?
The Move to the Edge is one of the strongest trends in technology. So, yes. I would never best against it.

(applies to computing and other technologies like power production and agriculture)

When I see AWS, cloud, and server side rendering frameworks it seems like we’re moving the other way in some sense.
There's a strong trend to push to the edge of the cloud though -- cloudfront workers, deno.deploy, etc
Yes, the vision is that everyone has an AI cube in their house.
The bots/machine vs human reminds me of that famous experiment from the 30s in which Winthrop Kellogg[0], a comparative psychologist, and his wife decided to raise their human baby (Donald) simultaneously with a chimpanzee baby (Gua) in an effort to "humanize the ape". It was set out to last 5 years but was relatively quickly abrupted after only 9 months. The explicit reason wasn't stated only that it successfully proved the hereditary limits within the "nature vs nurture" debate of a chimpanzee, the reticent statement reads as follows:

>Gua, treated as a human child, behaved like a human child except when the structure of her body and brain prevented her. This being shown, the experiment was discontinued

There have been a lot of speculation as to other reasons of ending the experiment so prematurely. Maybe exhaustion. One thing which seemed to dawn on the parents - if one reads carefully - is that a human baby is far superior at imitating than the chimpanzee baby, frighteningly so, that they decided to abort the experiment early on in order to prevent any irreversible damage in the development to their human child which at that point had become far more similar to the chimpanzee than the chimpanzee to the human.

So, I would rephrase "the internet is dead" into "the internet becomes increasingly undead" because humans condition themselves in a far more accelerated way to behave like bots than bots are potentially able to do. From the wrong side this could be seen as progress when in fact it's opposite progress. It sure feels like that way for a lot of of people and is a crucial reciprocal element often overlooked/underplayed (mostly in a benign effort to reduce unnecessary complexities) when analyzing human behaviour in interactions with the environment.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winthrop_Kellogg#The_Ape_and...

Wow this is such a mind bending perspective. Thanks for sharing it.
So maybe the Turing Test is not about AI are smart enough, but about how stupid humans become?
Not stupid; imaginative and agreeable.
These are also the elements that make a good hypnosis subject.

I can't put a dumb person under.

I need someone with an active imagination who wants to work with me (for best results)

Are we sure there's a difference?
Case in point: recently, I've noticed that I'm getting more and more emails with the sign off "Warm regards." This is not a coincidence. It is an autosuggestion from Google. If you start signing off an email, it will automatically suggest "Warm regards." It just appears there -- probably an idea generated from an AI network. There are more and more of these algorithmic "suggestions" appearing every day, in more and more contexts. This is true for many text messaging programs: There are "common" replies suggested. How often do people just click on one of the suggested replies, as opposed to writing their own? These suggestions push us into conforming to the expectations of the algorithm, which then reinforces those expectations, creating a cycle of further pushing us into the language use patterns generated by software -- as opposed to idiosyncratic language created by a human mind.

In other words, people are already behaving like bots; and we're building more and more software to encourage such behavior.

Those suggestions appear in Google chat too and even if you don't click on them, the simple fact of reading the suggestion makes you much more likely to type it yourself. There's clearly a priming effect to it.
depends on your personality
On average, it doesn't. This is why advertising and magic work.
I'm a magician and a developer by training.

Now primarily employed in a marketing capacity.

Over my career I've worked with: - Doctors - Lawyers - Engineers - Fund managers - Academics (hard and soft sciences) - Mentalists/Hypnotists

All of them believed that they're specific training and temperament made them immune from simple persuasion techniques and that they were purely rational actors.

None of them struck me as any more rational/more independent thinkers than anyone else off the street

It is typical to rate yourself above your actual self.

Even when someone rates oneself down like when saying of themself that they're dumb, ugly or whatever, they generally mean it in a lesser fashion than for any other peer they'd attribute as such.

But its not above, its ascribung a mythical ability that does not exist - we don't talk about people who think they are psycic as optimistic, we call them crazy.

these guys are similar, except it's common belief.

nope, just being exposed to text influences you whether you want it or not
They're saying it might influence you to type something different. Some of us are just contrary.
Sometimes. Good luck keeping that up the majority of the time something tries to influence you.
Those suggestions are very few so I suspect they were hand-picked.
I don’t know if this is how it still works, but early attempts were modeled as classification problems with hundreds of hand picked completions. Can’t predict something really bad if it isn’t in your prediction list. This limits the surface of bad things to cases of tone mismatch like “sounds great” when talking about someone grieving a loss or something.
Doesn't GMail collect the data in some form of federated learning nowadays, like GBoard does? Federated learning does seem to be able to create the unintended positive feedback loop, converging on a single phrase and causing the users to lock themselves in a bubble.
Which is why it's important for folks to start applying AI to more interesting (but harder, more nuanced) problems. Instead of making it easier for people to write emails, or targeting ads, it should be used to help doctors, surgeons and scientists.

The problem is that these problems are less profitable. And that the companies with enough compute to train these types of models are concerned about getting more eyeballs, not making the world a better place.

The problem is not that those problems are less profitable. The problem is a combination of 1. Those problems are much harder 2. The potential harm from getting them wrong is much larger
Yup, I definitely agree that they're harder (and noted this). But I'm not sure I agree with your second point. Or rather, I think there's some nuance to it.

Sure, using AI to treat people without a human in the loop would clearly do harm. But using AI as an assistant, to help a doctor make the right diagnosis, seems like it'd do the opposite. It'd help doctors serve a larger patient population, make less mistakes, and probably equate to less harm in the long run.

Anyway, I think we can all agree that using AI for anything other than ad targeting is a net win.

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A tangentially related thought:

Actors attempt to imitate humans. “Good acting” is convincing; the audience believes the actor is giving a reasonable response to the portrayed situation.

But the audience is also trying to imitate the actors to some degree. Like you point out, humans imitate. For some subset of the population, I’d imagine the majority of social situations they are exposed to, and the responses to situations they observe, are portrayed by actors.

At what point are actors defining the social responses that they then try to imitate? In other words, at what point does acting beget acting and how much of our daily social interactions actually are driven by actors? And is this world of actors creating artificial social responses substantially different than bots doing the same?

This is a common phenomena where the fake is more believable than the real thing due to over exposure of the imitation.

Famously the bald eagle sounds nothing like it does in tv and the movies and explosions are rarely massive fireballs. For human interaction it’s much harder to pin down cause and effect but if it happens in other cases it would be very surprising to not happen there.

Someone wrote once about how Wall Street people started behaving like the slick image projected of them in movies in the 80s, namely of Michael Douglas; before that they were more like the "boring accountant" type.
thanks for the awesome analogy, I always had the sinking feeling that the bots are finding it increasingly easy to fit in among the humans because the humans on social media act increasingly like bots.

"monkey see, monkey do"

It's the commonly believed reason; the child starting to take on habits from Gua, like noises when she wanted something, and the way monkeys scratch themselves. No authoritative source for it though, it's what I've been told during a lecture back in college, and I think PlainlyDifficult mentions it too in their video about it.

https://youtu.be/VP8DD9TGNlU

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Nice post! But to me your analogy does not really stand : bots are the ones catching up with human conversation in an "accelerated way", feeding on a corpus that predates them. Bots are not an invariant nature that netizens imitate.
My mind is blown. Thanks for sharing. Especially with the movie analogy. I’m a very movie person and I imitate my personality traits a lot based on characters on movies…
I sincerely regret that I had only one upvote to give you. This shit is so insidious that IMO everyone should just simply stop doing it until they've thought it through a lot more.

> ...humans condition themselves in a far more accelerated way to behave like bots than bots are potentially able to do.

Than bots can condition themselves to behave like humans, I presume. They can already behave exactly like bots. :-)

It's more likely, if not inevitable that these things will become ubiquitously available remotely, like Siri and Alexa. It's access that's important, not hosting.
There’s a very simple solution, of course: turn off the computer and physically interact with real people.
Running the models like this on own computer is already possible with DeepSpeed. I think it even supports training albeit it would be extremely slow.

https://www.deepspeed.ai/

Unpopular opinion: something will stop egalitarian power for the masses. I had high hopes for multicore computing in the late 90s and early 2000s but it got blocked every step of the way by everyone doubling down on DSP (glorified vertex buffer) approaches on video cards, leaving us with the contrived dichotomy we see today between CPU and GPU.

Whatever we think will happen will not happen. A less-inspired known-good state will take its place, creating another status quo. Which will funnel us into dystopian futures. I'm just going off my own observations and life experience of the last 20 years, and the way that people in leadership positions keep letting the rest of us down after they make it.

In what sense is the dichotomy between CPU and GPU contrived? Those are designed around fundamentally different use cases. For low power devices you can get CPU and GPU integrated into a single SOC.
That's a good question. I wish I could answer it succinctly.

For me, the issue is that use cases and power usage are secondary to the fundamental science of computation. So it's fine to have matrix-processing stuff like OpenGL and TensorFlow, but those should be built on general-purpose hardware or else we end up with the cookie cutter solutions we have today. Want to run a giant artificial life simulation with genetic algorithms? Sorry, you can't do that on a GPU. And it turns out that most of the next-gen stuff I'm interested in just can't be done on a GPU.

There was a lot of progress on transputers and clusters (the old Beowulf cluster jokes) in the 80s and 90s. But researchers came up against memory latency issues (Amdahl's law) and began to abandon those approaches after video cards like the 3dfx Voodoo arrived around 1997.

But there are countless other ways to implement concurrency and parallelism. If you think of all the techniques as a galaxy, then GPUs are way out at the very end of one spiral arm. We've been out on that arm for 25 years. And while video games have gotten faster (at enormous personal effort by millions of people), we've missed out on the low hanging fruit that's possible on the other arms.

For example, code can be auto-parallelized without intrinsics. It can be statically analyzed to detect contexts which don't affect others, and the instructions in those local contexts could be internally spread over many cores. Like what happens in shaders.

But IMHO the greatest travesty of the modern era is that those innovations happened (poorly) in GPUs instead of CPUs. We should be able to go to the system menu and get info on our computer and see something like 1024+ cores running at 3 GHz. We should be able to use languages like Clojure and Erlang and Go and MATLAB and even C++ that auto-parallelize to that many cores. So embarrassingly parallel stuff like affine rasterization and blitters would run in a few cycles with ordinary for-loops instead of needing loops that are unrolled by hand or whatever other tedium that distracts developers from getting real work done. Like, why do we need a completely different paradigm for shaders outside of our usual C/C++/C# workflow, where we can't access system APIs or even the memory in our main code directly? That's nonsense.

And I don't say that lightly. My words are imperfect, but I do have a computer engineering degree. I know what I'm talking about, down to a very low level. Wherever I look, I just see so much unnecessary effort where humans tailor themselves to match the whims of the hardware, which is an anti-pattern at least as bad as repeating yourself. Unfortunately, the more I talk about this, the more I come off as some kind of crackpot as the world keeps rushing headlong out on the GPU spiral arm without knowing there's no there there at the end of it.

My point is that for all the progress in AI and rendering and simulation, we could have had that 20 years ago for a tiny fraction of the effort with more inspired architecture choices. The complexity and gatekeeping we see today are artifacts of those unfortunate decisions.

I dream of a day when we can devote a paltry few billion transistors on a small $100 CPU to 1000+ cores. Instead we have stuff like the Cerebras CS-2 with a trillion transistors for many thousands of dollars, which is cool and everything, but is ultimately gatekeeping that will keep today's Anakin from building C-3PO.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-core_(computing)#Hardwar...

You're an optimist.

Before any of the things you describe happen, most states will mandate the equivalent of a carry permit to be able to freely use compute for undeclared and/or unapproved purposes.

Comments like this make me feel like I'm losing my mind.

I think it's far more likely that in 10 years we'll all become more used to rolling blackouts, and fondly remember we all used to be able to afford to eat out, and laugh over a glass of cheap gin about how wild things were back in the old days before things got really bad.

10 years ago was a much more exciting and hopeful time than today. I remember watching Hinton show off what deep learning was just starting to do. It was frankly more interesting that high parameter language models. Startups were all working on some cool problems rather than just trying to screw over customers.

That's just technology. Economically, socially and ecologically things looks far brighter in 2012 than they do now, and in 2032 I suspect we'll feel the same about today, but far more dramatically.

We've already pass the peak of "things are getting better all the time!" but people are just in denial about this.

You're not alone - especially based on observations during the pandemic, it seem we are woefully unaware and unprepared for how fragile the structures supporting our current way of living are, and how easy they would collapse into a much worse state of living conditions when it comes to power and food, let alone luxuries and internet as we know it...

It also seems to me that most people would not be ready to give up more than 10% of their luxuries / way of living up-front in order to protect those structures and would continue to watch funny TikTok videos and post IG photos until the very moment their internet access goes out and doesn't come back.

>> I have to wonder if 10 years down the line, everyone will be able to run models like this on their own computers.

Do you mean train or run? My assumption was all these models could be run on most computers, probably with a simple docker container, as long as there is sufficient RAM to hold the network, which should be most laptops > 16gb ram.

Speaking of which, anyone have recommendations on pre-trained docker containers with weights included?

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Seeing those gigantic models it makes me sad that even the 4090 is supposed to stay at 24GB of RAM max. I really would like to be able to run/experiment on larger models at home.
Can Apple Silicone's unified memory be an answer?
Wondering if Apple Silicon will bring arge amounts of unified main memory with high bandwidth to the masses?

The Mac Studio maxes out at 128GB currently for around $5K, so 256GB isn't that far out and might work with the ~200GB Yandex says is required.

Perhaps on quantity. Substantially slower though around ~3x from what I can tell…substantial roadblock if you’re training models that take weeks.
I meant for inference, not training. People just want to run the magic genies locally and post funny AI content.
ah right - gotcha
Take a look at Apple's M1 Max, a lot of fast unified memory. No idea how useful though
What's the difference between Apple's unified memory and the shared memory pool Intel and AMD integrated GPUs have had for years?

In theory you could probably assign a powerful enough iGPU a few hundred gigabytes of memory already, but just like Apple Silicon the integrated GPU isn't exactly very powerful. The difference between the M1 iGPU and the AMD 5700G is less than 10% and a loaded out system should theoretically be tweakable to dedicate hundreds of gigabytes of VRAM to it.

It's just a waste of space. An RTX3090 is 6 to 7 times faster than even the M1, and the promised performance increase of about 35% for the M2 will means nothing when the 4090 will be released this year.

I think there are better solutions for this. Leveraging the high throughput of PCIe 5 and resizable BAR support might be used to quickly swap out banks of GPU memory, for example, at a performance decrease.

One big problem with this is that GPU manufacturers have incentive to not implement ways for consumers GPUs to compete with their datacenter products. If a 3080 with some memory tricks can approach an A800 well enough, Nvidia might let a lot of profit slip through their hands and they can't have that.

Maybe Apple's tensor chip will be able to provide a performance boost here, but it's stuck on working with macOS and the implementations all seem proprietary so I don't think cross platform researchers will really care about using it. You're restricted by Apple's memory limitations anyway, it's not like you can upgrade their hardware.

Apple gets significant latency and frequency benefits from placing their LPDDR4 on the SoC itself.
Unified memory is and always has been a cost cutting tactic. Its not a feature not matter how much manufacturers who use it try to claim it is.
Apple is selling M1's with > 200gb ram? Have a link so I can buy one?
Nvidia deliberately keeps their consumer/gamer cards limited in memory. If you have a use for more RAM, they want you to buy their workstation offerings like RTX A6000 which has 48G DDR6 RAM or A100 which has 80G.
What NVIDIA predominantly does on their consumer cards is limit the RAM sharing, not the RAM itself. The inability for each GPU to share RAM is the limiting factor. It is why I have RTX A5000 GPUs and not RTX 3090 GPUs.
It's also a power issue. The 4090 sounds like you're going to need a much, MUCH higher PSU than you currently use.. or it'll suddenly turn off as it uses 2-3x the power.

You'll need your own wiring to run your PC soon :-)

I think it is a stupid question, but does the power consumption needed by processors to infer compared to human brains demonstrate that there is something fundamentally wrong for the AI approach or is it more physics related?

I am not a physicist or biologist or anything like that so my intuition is probably completely wrong but it seems to me that for more basic inference operations (lets say add two numbers) power consumption from a processor and a brain is not that different. It’s like seeing how expensive it is for computers to infer for any NLP model, humans should be continuously eating carbs just to talk.

> but it seems to me that for more basic inference operations (lets say add two numbers) power consumption from a processor and a brain is not that different

Sure it is - it is too hard to figure it out based on 2 numbers number, but lets multiply that by a billion - how much energy does it take a computer to add two billion numbers? Far less than the energy it would take a human brain to add them.

Around room temperature, an ideal silicon transistor has a 60 mV/decade subthreshold swing, which (roughly speaking) means that a 10-fold increase in current requires at least a 60 mV increase in gate potential. There are some techniques (e.g. tunneling) that can allow you to get a bit below this, but it's a fairly fundamental limitation of transistors' efficiency.

[It's been quite a while since I studied this stuff, so I can't recall whether 60 mV/decade is a constant for silicon specifically or all semiconductors.]

The AI is much faster than the brain, if you batch requests the cost goes down.
The RAM is not using all that much of the power, and I think that scales more on bus width than capacity.
I bought a 1500w psu soon after the previous crypto collapse for around $150, one of the best purchases I did.
If you don't care about inference speed being in the 1-5sec range, then that should be doable with CPU offloading, with e.g. DeepSpeed.
200+ GiB of RAM still sounds like a pretty steep hardware requirement.
If you have an nvme deepspeed can offload there as a second tier once the RAM is full.

175 GB aggregate on both RAM and nvme is in the realm of home deep learning workstation.

As long as you aren’t too fussy about inference speed of course.

Oh yeah, that $750 for 256GB of DDR-4 is going to totally break the bank.
Damn I didn't know ram was so cheap
It only gets expensive if you insist on sourcing it from enterprise vendors. The first 256GB I paid $2,400 for. The second 256GB I paid $1,200 a little over a year later. And the third 256GB I paid $800 about seven months later. I've got a workstation with 768GB DDR4 and I am considering upping that to 1.5TB if the prices on the 256GB sticks will come down.
For the people that didn't click on the link:

>but is able to work with different configurations with ≈200GB of GPU memory in total which divide weight dimensions correctly (e.g. 16, 64, 128).

well, I can call this "the real open ai".
Who controls Google? What did Google do to stop the inasion of Iraq? Will Google take responsibility for silent support od war in Iraq?
Your comparison fails a test of facts. Yandex actively censors any perspective not approved by the Kremlin. Google does not do anything comparable to this.
Google absolutely does the same thing.
Not to mention that Yandex does it in Russia because the law forces them to, while Google does it happily just to maintain the political status quo, of which they are a part of.
Google does not show government propoganda on search engine front page. If Yandex wanted to shut down their news aggregator they could have done it.
Care to elaborate?
There is lots of content Google bans/hides. Copyrighted content, Adult content, child pornography, official secrets, etc.

I don't think thats so different from other countries which also have a (partially overlapping) list of whats not allowed.

Normally, when people think about that they say "well pictures of naked children are morally wrong, whereas talking about LGBTQ stuff is fine". But people in other parts of the world might have different morals and might think the other way around.

Also google specifically bans content that:

- Disparage or belittle victims of violence or tragedy.

- Deny an atrocity.

- We don’t allow content that promotes terrorist or extremist acts, which includes recruitment, inciting violence, or the celebration of terrorist attacks.

Now I don't think these are bad rules, but they are rules that very much depend on the official narrative. A terrorist to one is a freedom fighter to another. These are rules that can be applied as wanted.

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/10622781

(comment deleted)
Please ask the model to answer these questions.
Wonder what the split is between Russian and English in the model?
Open the vocab file (from the script in the download directory) and you can get a pretty good idea.

Looks to be approximately 50/50 from my random scrolling through the list.

That's because English and Russian have pretty similar vocabulary size. Vocabulary does not reflect the size of the data.
In this case, it does, because the vocab is not a list or words, but a list of tokens. Each token may be a word, but it might also be a phrase or part of a word. The tokens are generated to be optimal on the input data - ie. for a given vocab size to minimize the number of tokens to represent it.

Therefore, the size of the vocab gives a good guide to the size of the data, since if there was 10x more english language data then the optimal distribution would be to dedicate more token space to english than russian.

What sort of machine can run this model?
Nvidia DGX
I can see it is about 150.000 USD for such a machine. Is this the cheapest option out there?
Well you can custom-build a suitable system for the middle five digits. It's still not something every idiot can run, but most medium to large companies can set up their own for sure.
Now we just need someone to figure out how to compress the model to get similar performance in 10B parameters.

I assume some of the services that offer GPT-J APIs will pick this up, but it doesn't look cheap or easy to get this running.

The download fails because the vocab file link returns HTTP 403... :-(

https://yalm-100b.s3.yandex.net/vocab/voc_100b.sp

EDIT: It seems fine if you download with a browser useragent not CURL... I guess I just got hit by some anti-bot thing they have accidentally have turned on.

Try opening the inspector in firefox, selecting the download request and using "copy as CURL". That gives you a working curl command.
I don't want to defend them, but I'm genuinely curious: aren't they maybe doing it because the opposite will cause them huge legal issues?
They can protest, they can boycott, they can disagree, they can tell the truth.

But... They chose to obey.

It's the choice that matters.

From what I've seen, telling the truth in authoritian countries doesn't end up well.

To the best of my knowledge, they are a Russian company - it's not like they can just tell the truth and move away from Russia that easily, so I think (and hope?) they're just playing a political game.

What would Google do in their position? Idk

They will simply have their company taken away from them.

Nevertheless, they had many years before the war to start marking their news as 'Official'. Or sell the news service. They certainly could have done so. This would have solved their image problems.

This is often overlooked and it's a fair point in defence of the people working for Yandex. You can't judge someone just for working for Yandex or even most Russian companies. The people who have voiced concern are already out of the company and it's perfectly reasonable that the rest would like to keep their jobs, especially in uncertain economic times with all these sanctions against Russia.

However, this also implies that Yandex, as a company, cannot be trusted. It's not the researcher's fault, but they simply aren't allowed to work in a way that doesn't reinforced the Russian government's bias. As usual, the Russian government is the real villain here, but its authoritarian rule "infects" any company and country it has control over.

It can be assumed that the people working for Yandex are also victims of their abusive government, but that doesn't change the fact that their work is unlikely to be trusted outside the Russian sphere of influence.

Any similarity to our news and search services is pure coincidence
There is hardly any.
(comment deleted)
Not for being Russians, but for active participation in censorship by tweaking their news aggregation to show only hand picked government approved sources
Is there a source for this? I'm curious.
Just read about Yandex.News which display censored news sources on Yandex frontpage that millions of people visit. There is really no hidden censorship here - they just follow Russian law that literally whitelist exclusively press controlled by the state.

They show Kremlin propoganda on their front page which makes Yandex part of Kremlin propoganda machine. They could have shut down news agregator, but they choose not to.

https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4975254

https://www.moscowtimes.ru/2022/04/18/yandeks-ubral-izpoisko...

https://zona.media/news/2021/12/25/oiya

https://www.rbc.ru/politics/07/09/2021/613709739a79476fd52e1...

They are complying with russian censorship laws and it's gotten so bad that they are planning to sell the news service altogether to VK which is far worse than Yandex when it to how eager they are to enforce these laws and to work with cops.

https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/5258943

Exactly what google has been doing the past year or two.
> The former Yandex CEO literally moved to Israel to escape Western sanctions.

That somehow doesn't support the point your are trying to make at all...

What have Israel connections got to do with shadiness? What are you insinuating?
Settling land that was recently taken from Palestinian families by force, often (literally) knocking the existing houses over with a bulldozer. In my opinion, that's a moral red flag to participate in such an atrocity.
What has Yandex got to do with any of that? Is everyone who lives in a country that commits atrocities "shady as fuck"?

<edit>: reading closely I see that the initial allegation did use the word "settlement", and indeed that would constitute ethically questionable behavior. However, a sibling comment refutes this.

I think you’re missing that the commenter was talking about Israeli settlers rather than Israelis in general? The settlers are controversial because they live in areas Israel occupied during the 6 day war in 1967. Much of the world considers their presence illegal, though Israel disputes that. Many, if not most, would consider living in these settlements a deliberate political provocation.

*edit: you hadn’t posted your edit yet. I have no idea if the allegation is truthful.

*edit again: Why do downvoters think I’m wrong?

I'm not sure if the parent comment really meant specifically settlers, since some people consider all of Israel to be "settling on land stolen by Palestinians".

That said, you might be right about parent's intention, in which case I agree with your post. Israeli settlers are definitely considered to be doing it partially as a political move, though some are doing it for economic reasons.

(comment deleted)
Have you seen what America has done in the Middle East the last 20 years? If you want to make a moral point then you should start there instead of trying to grind whatever axe you have against Israel.
Why does it have to be mutually exclusive? The thread is about Israel, so they're pointing out Israel's crimes. You can be critical of multiple governments simultaneously.
>> when some of the Yandex founders and management have lived in Israeli settlements.

So now you have one more reason to say Yandex is bad for the world.

Bad comment. First, can you please name the founder? Because according to wiki Ilya Segalovich never lived in Israel and Arkady_Volozh lives in Tel Aviv (Not a settlement). Both Jewish, so why present it as some "must-be-hidden-cause" connection with Israel?

Also, nothing shady from Israel side in term of sanctions. They have a large Jewish community in both Russia and Ukraine and need to be on good term with both to have their gov helping in supporting (or evacuating) them. Not to mention Russia has heavy presence in Syria which borders Israel. A conflict with Russia without anything like a NATO back is out of the question.

>Elena Bunina, who is Jewish, is stepping down from her role as CEO of Yandex LLC, 'Russia's Google,' amid the war in Ukraine. Sources confirm she is in Israel and has no intention of returning to Russia

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/tech-news/2022-04-06/ty-...

(comment deleted)
It doesn't say she lives in a settlement. Or have any special treatment from Israel or influence on Israel in term of sanctions.
Many people consider all of Israel to be an illegitimate Western colonial settler state in the Middle East.
Then they have some explaining to do. As they are very wrong, from a historical/archaeological point view [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_and_Judais...

> Then they have some explaining to do. As they are very wrong, from a historical point view [1]

Kind of explains the general vibe of relations between everyone in that area historically

The relevant Wikipedia page is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazars
Did you read it? It literally has a "Use in antisemitic" section. Can you have any bigger red flag?

> Use in antisemitic polemic

> conspiracy theorist, David Icke, who states that the Israelians falsely claim to be descendants of the Biblical Jews

I don't really care about conspiracy theorists. Mainly because they ignore 2000 years of accepted archeology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirteenth_Tribe#Genetic_r...

This led me to look up similar information. Another article [1] looks into this a little more deeply.

I feel there is a resurgence of despising European dominance over the last 200 years and Israel is just another point here. Thus, we have material hypothesizing the illegitimacy of European Jews when the Jews of other ethnicities may have better acceptance in the region. (But all of this is just a vague hypothesis.)

[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/tracing-roots-jewish...

Those “many people” are likely ignorant and/or antisemitic.
> Bad comment.

>> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

I've no horse in this race, so please don't take this the wrong way,

Escaping western sanctions by moving to Israel + Being a Russian shill are usually mutually inclusive, not exclusive things.

(comment deleted)
Side note: Yandex search is awesome, and I really hope they stay alive forever. It's the only functional image search nowadays, after our Google overlords neutered their own product out of fear over lawyers/regulation and a disdain for power users.

You can't even search for images "before:date" in Google anymore.

Yandex Image Search is today is what Google Image Search should have been.

End of the day I’ll use what actually gets the job done.

Same goes for OpenAI and Google AI. If you don’t actually ever release and let others use your stuff and end paralyzed in fear at what your models may do then someone else is gonna release the same tech, and at this rate it seems like that’ll be Chinese or Russian companies who don’t share your sensibilities at all, and their models will be the ones that end up productized.

OpenAI should just rebrand since nothing they do is actually open.
You know 100 years ago you could just buy uranium openly? Leo Szílard hustled up 200 kilograms, pleted, in the 30's.
What does it have to do with OpenAI branding?

Their "moral" reasoning behind not publishing models is simply laughtable because they do sell API access to them to anyone who can pay. And "bad guys" generally have money.

They can (and do) revoke API access from bad guys. They can't do that to downloaded models. Look, I don't like what OpenAI does, but "API access, but no model download" makes sense if you are worried about misuses.
Bad actors still can get access to such models. It even makes them more dangerous than it would if everyone had access to them.

Here's an alternative: progressively release better and better models (like 3B params, 10B, 50B, 100B) and let people figure out the best way to fight against bad actors using them.

> It even makes them more dangerous than it would if everyone had access to them.

This is the sort of argument that proves guns would be less dangerous if everyone had access to them.

"An armed society is a polite society" - Robert Heinlein
He was an author of fiction. They usually write a lot of stuff that is on some deeper level "true", even though it is on the surface fictional... And a lot of stuff that isn't.

Or sometimes both, because it's only part of the truth. Maybe the complete version should be: "An armed society is a 'polite' society, but with very frequent killings and not-infrequent massacres." I think I prefer living in a less "polite" society.

"It even makes them more dangerous..." needs to be demonstrated, not asserted.
Every company out there says it will "revoke API access for misuse", but do they have transparency reports? Who do they even consider bad guys and what do they consider as misuse?

I would be totally on their side if their reasoning was that they dont publish models to compete with FAANG more efficiently and get more income for their research, but this moral reasoning just sounds completely fake because bad actors do have funding to train their own models.

OpenAI published "Lessons Learned on Language Model Safety and Misuse" in March. https://openai.com/blog/language-model-safety-and-misuse/ It also promised "forthcoming publication".

Examples of "real cases of misuse encountered in the wild" include "spam promotions for dubious medical products and roleplaying of racist fantasies".

Yes, some bad actors can train their own models, but OpenAI can't do much about that either way. It is doubtful whether spam promoters of dubious medical products can, at least for a while.

It would be better for misuse to be criminalized and taken care of by national governments, rather than leave it to for-profit companies to decide what is or isn't "misuse".

Personally, I think using AI to manufacture advertisements on demand is misuse... but will Google agree with me?

National governments are often the criminals themselves, or their partner.
>if you are worried about misuses

why is morality into this? is this the same discussion of car manufacturers not selling cars to certain people because they are worried about misuse?

Automotive companies, in fact, have product liability. It's about liability, not morality.
when you release a project into the wild under a permissive license, aren't you essentially washing yourself from any "liability" ?

> MIT " IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE."

don't commercial licenses have same/similar wording so what liability are you talking about?

So they do that because they're doing it for free. Otherwise they couldn't be generous with their work--those licenses are about permitting the generous intent.
We all know the real reason.

They used to be a non-profit with a mission, now they are a for-profit with the only mission of money.

Maybe they should rename to SafeAI, if their concern is controlling access.
Good point. The issue is not the policy per se, it's the fact that their name is not accurate.
I mean, the policy is kind of shit too, given that they used to have the mission of being open.

But yes, the name is not what it should be, given their current ideas.

IMO the main reason these companies don't release their models is not ethical concerns but money:

- NVIDIA sells GPUs and interconnect needed for training large models. Releasing a pretrained LM would hurt sales, while only publishing a teaser paper boosts them.

- Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offer ML-as-a-service and TPU/GPU hardware as a part of their cloud computing platforms. Russian and Chinese companies also have their clouds, but they have low global market share and aren't cost-efficient, so nobody would use them to train large LMs anyway.

- OpenAI are selling their models as an API with a huge markup over inference costs; they are also largely sponsored by the aforementioned companies, further aligning their interests with them.

Companies that release large models are simply those who have nothing to lose by doing so. Unfortunately, you need a lot of idle hardware to train them, and companies that have it tend to also launch a public cloud with it, so there is a perpetual conflict of interests here.

The “ethical concerns” thing is just a progressive-sounding excuse for why they’re not going to give their models away for free. I guarantee you those models are going to be integrated into various Google products in some form or another.
> Google overlords neutered their own product out of fear over lawyers/regulation

What kind of lawyers/regulation do you have in mind? If anything, I'd find the opposite: lawyers and copyright holders should be grateful for such a tool that - when it was still working - allowed you to trace websites using your images illegally.

Now they all use Yandex for this purpose, with relatively good results.

IIRC it was mostly from groups like Getty images. They and other image licensing companies didn't want google showing their images in search results. They claimed it was copyright infringement and given the absolute state of IP law in the US they could have made Google's life very difficult.
We're talking about reverse search, right? (Because "normal" image search still kind of works, it's reverse search that is completely broken.) In this case, you already have the copyrighted image, and if you find out that the same image is on Getty Images, then all the better as you can check it license. Also, it's better for GI as it gives them more exposure, and the kind of companies who use GI are very unlikely to pirate images.
Couldn't compliance with a robots.txt file have prevented all of this?
Oh I see. What I'm looking for is the reason why they broke the reverse image search. It was working well many years ago but some time after that they switched it to some strange image classifier (I upload an image of an apple to find exactly the same image to track its license of origin, and it says "possibly an image of an apple" - oh thank you Google I didn't know that.)
Do they at least tell you the type of Apple it is?
Tineye works reasonably well, for finding exactly the same image (including different resolutions, crops, etc.)

https://tineye.com/

> Tineye works reasonably well, for finding exactly the same image (including different resolutions, crops, etc.)

Tineye is definitely better than Google with crops, etc. Google reverse image search seems to have more data, but it seems much less able to recognize even basic modifications to the input.

> You misunderstood parent post. It's about Google not being sued for discrimination.

Who's suing them and on what grounds? If they made changes, it's probably for PR reasons, not legal ones.

Also not all of these seem "fixed" e.g.:

> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/08/does-goog...

Article from 2016, but results look very similar today: https://www.google.com/search?q=unprofessional+hair&source=l...

They used to have in their AI ethics department some of the most anti-AI progressives. They picked on everything - biased training data, discriminatory usage, consuming too much energy to train, models are just stochastic parrots, etc. while forgetting to mention any effort to mitigate the problems (of course these are real concerns and being under intense research) Now these critics are fired, but Google must have learned to fear them.

If they let everyone use the latest models, critics could uncover ugly biases in 10 minutes. Then Google would have to do damage control. These models are very suggestible. You can induce them to make fools of themselves.

I agree with this. When I am still addicted to porn, Yandex Image is the only one that seems to find relevant and useful links.
I regularly use it for a sample of what Google and Bing are intentionally omitting.
(comment deleted)
I agree, yandex is a great search engine
Well you can have it in the West. We'd prefer something separate from Kremlin.
We can have what, a great search engine? Maybe if you have a time machine to 2003
Just take it to America from us, thank you. Along with VK. Great search engine and a social network. Full of backdoors for thugs and corrupt police, censorship and other lovely stuff... but you'll probably say that Google is full of it too, because you had no experience of living in Russia.
and you haven't had experience of living in the states.
This comment needs expansion. Tell us your experience of police brutality and corruption in the US.
Lmao. Just read the news my man.
2003 certainly didn't have a better search engine. It only had a much smaller, open and un-SEO-biased Internet, making the indexing job correspondingly easier.
no it's not. they straight up serve kremlin, promoting kremlin fake news and silencing russian opposition (not much to silence but still). they can have whatever functionality they like, I still won't use it in billion years.
Yeah we definitely shouldn't worry about the political sympathies/vulnerabilities of the web services we use as the foundations of our shared knowledge...
Do you have the same level of concern about the leverage Five-Eyes intelligence agencies have over Facebook and Google?
There's a world of difference between Five-Eyes and being harrassed, mobbed, jailed, having a "Z" and "traitor" spray painted on your apartment door or being murdered.

By conflating those two clearly means you don't understand what's going on Russia and its Putin-controlled satellites like Belarus.

There's a world of difference between living in Russia and using Yandex to search for how to kill Putin and living in the west and using Yandex to search for how to spin up a FastAPI server.

By conflating those two clearly means you don't understand that everyone isn't in the same situation as yourself.

Julian Assange anyone? Gary Webb? Michael Hastings?

And you've got Abby Martin and Chris Hedges who've had much of their content removed by YouTube. Chris Hedges is even a Pulitzer prize winner.

You've named three people, and some YouTube videos.

On the other side, the FSB has deported 1.3 million innocent Ukrainian civilians to concentration camps. (number is from official Russian sources)

> to concentration camps

> number is from official Russian sources)

Surly you can give a kind stranger a link to these official sources?

Sure. Oh, wait, you meant give you something?

You're just a stranger. You'd have to prove you're kind.

https://www.bing.com/search?q=russia+filtration+camps

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-accuses-russia-...

"Despite all the difficulties created by the Kiev authorities, over the past day, 29,733 people, including 3,502 children, were evacuated from dangerous areas of Ukraine and the Republics of Donbass to the territory of the Russian Federation without the participation of the Ukrainian side. And in total, since the beginning of the special military operation, there are 1,936,911 people, of which 307,423 are children," Mikhail Mizintsev, head of the National Defense Control Center of the Russian Federation, said at a briefing on Saturday. https://www.interfax.ru/world/846957

Thanks for the reply.

>Reuters could not independently verify the figure given by Denisova or her allegations, for which she did not provide supporting evidence.

This is the first.

Interfax article doesn't loads for me right now, but I doubt they use the term "concentration camp" (like the previous poster said they do) too.

And given how I just today read how people in Kherson are happilly take Russian passports - I have a big doubt these accusations have a valid basis.

How do you feel about western-owned web services?
People in Russia felt much safer using iCloud, Gmail or Google Drive. Of course they comply to some requests by Kremlin or police. But Yandex or VK just give information straight away often times without much procedure.
the same way I feel much comfortable using Yandex in united states. Google and Facebook feed their data to NSA.
Any proof of that?
(comment deleted)
Snowden's leaks are not enough for you?
What proof Snowden provided about Google and FB feeding data to NSA exactly?
There is no clarity on these slides if collection happened proactively or it was a way to transfer information for FISA warrants.
You asked for proof of the following:

> Google and Facebook feed their data to NSA.

We know that at least some companies were ordered to handover all data, continuously [1].

edit: I think we have enough evidence that I would assume that it's valid for the other companies on the slides, and if it's not true you'll have to provide some proof of that.

edit 2: [2]

> It searches that database and lets them listen to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you've entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future."

> Greenwald explained that while there are "legal constraints" on surveillance that require approval by the FISA court, these programs still allow analysts to search through data with little court approval or supervision.

> "There are legal constraints for how you can spy on Americans," Greenwald said. "You can't target them without going to the FISA court. But these systems allow analysts to listen to whatever emails they want, whatever telephone calls, browsing histories, Microsoft Word documents."

> "And it's all done with no need to go to a court, with no need to even get supervisor approval on the part of the analyst," he added.

edit 3:

> Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” [3]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-reco...

[2] https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/07/glenn-greenwal...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligenc...

You brought two links on:

- phone calls surveillance in Venezuella: no Google no FB mentioned

- plain words of some reporter without any evidence provided, no Google no FB mentioned

Weird how there is limited hard evidence of a secret, illegal government program... It's a lot more than I've seen than evidence for the claims of Yandex proactively sharing data with the Russian government.

Also where do you see Venezuela?

So, no proof, no evidence. Ok.

> It's a lot more than I've seen than evidence for the claims of Yandex proactively sharing data with the Russian government.

The difference is that checks and balances are much stronger in US, and such activities can be successfully investigated and government sued.

As an example, your verizon case was successfully challenged: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klayman_v._Obama

In Russia, court system works in manual mode from Kremlin.

> Also where do you see Venezuela?

I misread, you are right.

> The difference is that checks and balances are much stronger in US,

You say that after we were talking about the NSA literally spying on US citizens, and without any proof? C'mon, are you really going to badger me about not having having the exact "hard evidence", and not even read my sources or provide ANY evidence yourself.

edit: Yes, it got challenged AFTER needing to be leaked by a whistleblower that still can't return to his home.

> Yes, it got challenged AFTER needing to be leaked by a whistleblower that still can't return to his home.

Good chance is that whistleblowing would be protected in this specific case.

Yes no,

> Snowden was charged with theft, “unauthorized communication of national defense information” and “willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person,” according to the complaint. The last two charges were brought under the 1917 Espionage Act.

"Yes no" what?

Government can charge him with whatever they want, it is up to court to decide if charges are valid.

The Espionage Act has no whistleblower protection. If the courts were allowed rule honestly and without political entanglements, there's no way the Espionage Act is constitutional at prima facia.
>So, no proof, no evidence.

Do you really expect the US government to literally publish their illegal surveillance operations on Wikipedia as proof?

Snowden's leaks and his statements should be enough to understand the big-tech surveillance apparatus aids the government under the table.

> Greenwald

...has become such a huge tinfoil-hat kook that it taints anything he's ever said and done. I have no way of knowing when his brain-rot started to affect his writings, so I can't really trust the shit that seemed so convincing back in 2003 any more.

You misunderstand. The NSA went out of their way to tap Google's lines outside of the US, which made the leadership at Google furious. It accelerated the work to encrypt international fiber (I think many people were really bothered by the tcpdump of a bigtable RPC containing a user ID). I was at a conference shortly after an saw a SVP rip an NSA rep to pieces.

If Google is doing anything that is required of them legally as a US corp, I don't have a problem with that.

That's what Google claims, however the leaked slides claimed "direct access".

edit: Does it really matter if they setup an FTP server instead of direct access, when we know a request can literally ask for "all" data (see Verizon).

> When required to comply with these requests, we deliver that information to the US government — generally through secure FTP transfers and in person," Google spokesman Chris Gaither told Wired, among other news outlets. [1]

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/googl...

right, you're discussing the mechanism by which Google shares information with the US government- when required by law.

These systems don't give access to "all" data. Telephone companies are different- AT&T had a long standing, off the books agreement with US intelligence agencies (see Idea Factory for a fact-based discussion of what AT&T did) to share large amounts of information illegally.

It's not that Russia Bad, it's that if you know a search engine will serve you censored, biased results that makes it an unreliable search engine.
And someone upthread claimed their image search was so great in comparison to google... because google also censors their results. They just censor different things.
Yandex users already assume it is censored and biased

they continue to use it however, because it gives them the expected results most of the time

Only if you're searching for censored things.
Compared to whom!? Who will serve you uncensored, unbiased results!? Like run your own crawler, dude grep, go to the library, come on!
People using duckduckgo bangs often use different search engines for different topics.

I usually try ddg first, if it's tech I use Bing, if it's local I use Google.

> yes russia bad

that is the point

Every country is or has been bad in some context in different times, because doing the interests of your country often translates into doing harm to some others. Yandex is a really nice search engine and I agree it's excellent for image searches compared to Google results polluted with Pinterest links and other cancerous SEO rubbish. But does Yandex echo propaganda for the Kremlin? Yes of course, as do Google and most of the others for their advertisers and governments, albeit to some different degrees. The usual approach when someone or some company with a controversial public image does something good with apparently no strings attached should be "Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes", that is, take the gift but don't trust them, mo matter if they're called Google, Microsoft, Yandex or whatever. Their purpose is of course to associate the Yandex brand, and therefore Russia, to something perceived as good, have more people use it, so that more users will be exposed to their filtered news. Just be aware of that, take the good and ignore the rest.
> Every country is or has been bad in some context in different times

When has Russia ever been anything but bad?

can you name any Russian company that doesn't?

obeying to Kremlin is just an aspect of running business in Russia

the only option would be not to operate in Russia at all. Yandex can't do this, because their audience is primarily in Russia

Well they've made their choice and silenced our protest and opposition, and later spewed pro-war anti-Ukrainian propaganda using country's largest media (Yandex News).

If you're profiteering from our suffering and choose Kremlin's needs over ours, don't be suprised then when we tell you to shove your AI models and your search.

they're selling Yandex News to VK (Mail.ru)
It's still working as usual and they announced the transition after 8 years of warmongering and blacklisting all opposition resources. And only when sanctions hit.

Now they scramble to present a whitewashed image to Western public. They will probably put themselves forward as great contributors to open source.

(comment deleted)
Who's we? I am not in this together. So change it to "I". I don't care about you lot... lmao
> Who's we?

From context, pretty obviously "we Ukrainians". Didn't do too well in elementary reading, did you?

> I am not in this together. So change it to "I". I don't care about you lot... lmao

Thank you for so effectively demonstrating what a despicable excuse for a human being you are. I'll do my best to remember this when next I come across anything from you.

Which doesn't excuse them at all. They are full-on supporting the war machine and bloodshed and bear responsibility.
Not really, it's very different for Yandex in particular. Along with several other companies like Vimpelcom, they started the "Safe Internet League", an organization which exploited the think of the children argument to build the censorship regime from scratch. They practically created the original censorship laws, or participated in the creation, when they were in the best position to resist the government (and had the incentive to do so). As an example, Telegram successfully resisted the censorship while having much less leverage, much later.

Of course Yandex likes to pose as the victim of censorship, but the truth is that they are the censors themselves. They've been steamrolled by a runaway process they helped to create.

Literally what google doing in favor of USA.
Huge difference. Google does it for money. Yandex does it to enable an autocracy and to maintain their ability to operate.
and how do you know google does not do it to maintain their ability to operate? That's the whole point of deep state, no?
I doubt that anything like this happend to Google execs in the US:

"Putin's agents reportedly threatened a top Google executive in Moscow with a 24-hour ultimatum – Take down Russia protest vote app or go to prison" -- https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-agents-threatened-goo...

Not yet at least, the political climate may deteriorate to that point, especially when it's about elections, given recent revelations.

Still, at least right now it looks to me - and I have visited Russia and Ukraine several times in the past and still have indirect connections (to people heavily involved in business there) - that there still is considerable more freedom from the government and its wishes for people and companies in the West.

If you publicly criticize a US politician you may get some hate messages, but at least they are from private citizens and you don't have FBI agents knocking on your door threatening you with prison. In Germany some rogue police were found to send threatening messages, but as soon as it was discovered the government acted against it. Also in Germany there even were public rallies from pro-Russian folks, now try that in Moscow with pro-Ukraine banners... Russia even bans the colors yellow and blue, even when they have nothing whatsoever to do with Ukraine and are just decorative: "Russians Strip Yellow and Blue From the Nation’s Streets Over Ukraine War" -- https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/04/27/in-photos-russians...

> you don't have FBI agents knocking on your door threatening you with prison.

Correct, it's DHS.

https://twitter.com/_secondthought/status/133274617257067725...

You know people online can just say things, right?
The United States has over 750 military bases in 80 countries. Which state is the militaristic state?
(comment deleted)
>I reject the false equivalence of the DHS and FSB. Not gonna both-sides this, sorry.

lmao mkay. Not identical, but very similar. It's not even 'Alex Jones'-tier to say this. I think you forget you are if you are under US or (even NATO). YOU WILL hear propaganda from your side, as the Russians do. It's NORMAL. We live under control of a hegemon with self-interests.

May I have to remind you of these? And tell me the difference between these and Russian spookery:

>Assange was being hunted down by the US worldwide (https://diem25.org/exactly-10-years-ago-wikileaks-released-a...)

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

I could go on, but the point was made already.

Edit: So yes, it's actually 'both sides'

Yeah, you could go on, but you get paid per post, not per word.
Unmasked as a shill for saying that great powers engage in propaganda, false flagging and dissent crushing.

I have no skin in the game. War, no war, it doesn't matter to me the outcome of this war to be honest.

EDIT: But if you are all moral highground, answer me this:

Why did the US goad Ukraine into taking a hostile stance against a neighbouring (and somewhat rival) great power? Whas this to the interest of Ukranians? Or to the geopolitical interests of US? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93eyhO8VTdg

I don't accept that you can make this case:

"Why did you, W, goad X into expressing their sovereignty against Y? Didn't you know that Y would react with violence? That makes W the bad guy"

No, Y is always on the wrong side; you can't use the threat of violence and then claim via realpolitik that the other side was in the wrong. "Moral high ground" means you act out of principle, not political convenience. In this case, Ukraine didn't want to be in the Russian sphere, so we supported them.

And now yeah, the US is paying a lot of money and inconvenience to support Ukraine. Gas will be more expensive, we're spending tens of billions on weapons. But that's because it's the right thing to do; not every decision is a realpolitik game about maximizing revenue from vassal states (which I hope Russia will learn someday).

what I meant for the goading part was this:

Ukraine has self interests. Everyone has. But not everyone can actualize those, due to reality. The reality is that Ukraine neighbours a powerful hegemon.

Since international relations are anarchistic (due to not being a supra-entity that has authority over states [authority!=international courts bullsh*]), Ukraine hasn't any right (to its sovereign, that does not exist) to be sovereign. It has to go out and look for itself.

Ukraine thought that had the US/NATO back, that made it act in a more reckless way (kind of when you rely on your big brother type stuff). It escalated 'till it decided it wanted to join NATO. It was goaded.

>you can't use the threat of violence and then claim via realpolitik that the other side was in the wrong.

who says? That's your problem. You lack the 'anarchistic' framework of geopolitics.

Now, realpolitik-wise, Ukraine's self-interests (of being more independent of Russia thru NATO) did clash with Russia's self-interests of being safe (and probably made Russia have a expansionary Casus Belli).

I feel that the US triggered and amplified the war, thru regime change in Ukraine (yep, maidan was a coup), recognizing aspirations of UA to NATO, making Zeleskyy too comfy to be more harsh in negotiations (where he had no leverage, cuz Ukraine's power small vs Rus.), ultimately resulted in unnecessary deaths, just for the purpose of sphere of influence expansion.

>so we supported them.

Even if it's reckless and could trigger something like this?

Also, I will play the 'reversed roles card' again. This time with a REAL example. Cuba. Was. The. Same. Thing.

That's why this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods and this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_Doctrine.

US has the same pattern as Russia. It's actually incredible how close these are.

> clash with Russia's self-interests of being safe

They clash with Russia's perceived self-interests of being safe, yes. The problem is, Russia defines "being safe" the same way it always has, under the General Secretaries of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and all the (other) Tsars before, going right back to when the Grand Duchy of Muscovy emerged from vassalage to the Mongols: by distance of their borders from Moscow. And the distance they want is at least up to Warsaw, Vienna and Sofia, but preferably Berlin or Paris (or, better yet, Lisbon).

That kind of clashes with the current world order, where there are quite a lot of currently sovereign nations in the way, which would have to be subordinated to Moscow – or basically just wiped off the map – to give Russia what its leadership wants.

What you're advocating is in effect that this is how it should be, because Russia is "a great power". (Newsflash: So were Germany and Japan in 1939. And, to compare with Russia's current equal in GDP, Italy.)

A more rational solution would be that Russia updates its concept of "being safe" to at least the 20th century. (Or, hey, one that worked for at least some countries even in the 19th: Don't be an asshole to anyone, then nobody will want to attack you.)

> yep, maidan was a coup

I've found that to be rhe most infallible heuristic on social media for – oh-so-coincidenctally – the last third of a year: Calls Maidan a "coup" → is a Putler-propagandist troll.

> UA ... NATO ... Zeleskyy [yadda yadda] ultimately resulted in unnecessary deaths

Oh, that's funny. And here I thought it was Putler's unilateral decision to start a war of aggression causing all those deaths.

> Why did the US goad Ukraine into taking a hostile stance against a neighbouring (and somewhat rival) great power?

You gravely misspelled "Why did the US support the sovereign nation-state Ukraine in asserting its independence against a neighbouring rogue state whose dictatorial regime has delusions of still being a 'great power'?"

But I don't know, maybe that was what you meant to write and some evil employees at one of Putin's troll factories inserted their master's propaganda into your otherwise so well-thought-out piece.

You broke the site guidelines badly here. The rules apply regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it is. We've had to warn you about this kind of thing a lot. If you keep doing it, we're going to end up having to ban you, so please stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Would you please stop posting flamewar comments and using HN for ideological battle? We ban accounts that do those things, and you've already been doing it repeatedly.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

>Would you please stop posting flamewar comments

Sure, my rhetotic got kinda out of line. I get excited debating.

>and using HN for ideological battle

I reject the characterization, it's almost implying I have an end with these posts besides putting a point of view that's at least an alternative to status quo that can make people realize they don't have any skin in the game, and that the US State Dept. has. I also don't. I don't really care about the outcome of the war.

>If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

I'll do that then. Thanks for the heads up.

> I don't really care about the outcome of the war.

Which IMO is a comment that only a shitty person would make.

Not everyone who questions US foreign policy is a paid Russian agent.
You can twist it however you like, and select individual sentences and ignore the context and everything else I wrote. At this point (again, may get worse, it does not look good IMO) Russia is at least an order of magnitude worse. You have individual cases - maybe - in the US, but in Russia it's systemic and systematic and goes all the way to murder not just of the person but of the entire family - as we saw in March, when two oligarchs and their entire family were murdered, one in Russia, one in Spain (summary of oligarch deaths: https://www.businessinsider.com/these-are-all-the-russian-ol...). On top of that various murders of "traitors" e.g. in UK and in Germany. Trump got close in rhetoric to what Putin said on Russian TV in March but did not have a chance to implement it, and the US institutions still resist and don't (yet?) follow a dictator blindly, as they do in Russia.
> I doubt that anything like this happend to Google execs in the US:

It seems plausible; we don't know what gets done under the FISA court but it would presumably involve companies like Google. Some suited agent of the US government turning up at Google HQ and threatening jail time under some FISA warrant if some pro-Trump something doesn't disappear off Google.

That'd be a scandal but not the worst abuse of the secret court system. It hasn't exactly covered itself with glory since inception. They already spy on basically everyone and that is a lot worse than some light censorship.

> Take down Russia protest vote app or go to prison

What about Canadian truckers? Didn't Trudeau call them terrorists, took their trucks, donations, bank accounts and driver licenses... There is no right to protest anywhere, don't kid yourself.

The Canadian truck protesters were allowed to shut down the center of the city, blast their horns 24 hours a day, and shut down a major international trade route. They were permitted to do this for weeks before the citizens got sick of it and demanded action from their government.

They gave protest a bad name.

Your conclusion that "There is no right to protest anywhere" is simply ridiculous.

>Your conclusion that "There is no right to protest anywhere" is simply ridiculous.

BLM rioters did this, and more. Violence + Property damage + Corporate Backing + gov backing. They didn't had their donation money seized,and almost no resistance to establish order.

Yes, the BLM protests are more examples of the right to protest being alive and well.
You're going to get downvoted, but Eric Schmidt worked regularly with the state department, and google employees were involved in spurring the color revolutions.

Julian Assange detailed this in a newsweek article before his name and body were smeared into the ground:

https://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-27...

Oh, but they say he's not trustworthy, or that it's a conspiracy theory that he was intentionally smeared. Well, the CIA and their contractors have been doing it for over a decade, even before he was unfairly accused of helping trump:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/02/the-ridiculous-p...

Google is an arm of the state department, no doubt.

I think you ran out of tinfoil this one is so large.
Yeah first thing we hear of US gov using tech companies for spionage and data mining. So much tinfoil yadda yadda
Always the response is to smear with the same thoughtless label when no valid criticism is put forward. There is a link to an actual proposal by a CIA contractor, no tinfoil necessary.
I would assume this could go unsaid, but apparently it needs to be said somewhere in this thread: there is zero comparison between the US and an autocratic dictator who attempts to kill and then jails his opposition, runs fraudulent elections, kills journalists, and invades sovereign countries. Zero. None. Zero.

Zero.

Get it?

None.

Zero.

I mean, if your only criteria is the intensity of the quality, then kinda.

But... :

(persecuted journalist)

>https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-61839256

>https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2013/07/usa-must-not-...

(jails its opposition)

>https://eu.usatoday.com/storytelling/capitol-riot-mob-arrest...

>"hatespeech" (newspeak)

>fraudulent elections: funny how the concerns that 'half' of the US had with elections were dismissed. Especially when conditions were different, by using a method usually agreed (until now, cuz narrative) prone to tampering. So much for free and fair elections.

So _Zero_ huh?

> So _Zero_ huh?

Zero comparison.

Sure, there's probably a non-zero amount of germs in the pasteurised homogenised and sterilly-packaged milk I buy at the supermarket. So is drinking that equivalent to sucking the pus out of a punctured boil on the arse of a diseased cow?

No. There's zero comparison. None. Zero.

Learn to read, man. If nothing else, it'll make you a better propaganda troll for your Kremlin master.

You know that some people use search engines for other things than news right?
What a hyperbolic emotional liar incapable of reasoning...
First of all regardless for political situation this is great step in making ML research actually open. So huge thanks for those developers who pushed to make it public. Still...

Yandex is in fact share responsibility for Russian government actions. While it impossible to fight censorship they could certainly shut down their News service completely.

Yandex could also certainly move more of their company and staff out of country. It was their deliberate choice stay in Russia and getting advantages on local market by using their political weight.

How much responsibility does Google share for US wrecking Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria?
Google doesn't censor antiwar propaganda.
There's no laws in US which punish for spreading antiwar propaganda which Google needs to comply with.
There's no law that says Yandex must operate in Russia.
(comment deleted)
Yandex has offices in 8 countries. I wonder if they censor news everywhere or only in Russia.
Blatantly incorrect. Google engages in egregious political censorship all the time. Including censorship for Russian government and censorship of US anti-war voices.

https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-responds-to-cpac-censorshi...

https://reclaimthenet.org/google-expanded-its-censorship-of-...

https://reclaimthenet.org/russia-continues-to-order-google-t...

In US they pretend to "decide" to censor things "on their own" because 1st amendment prevents the government from officially demanding censorship.

> This is either astounding ignorance or blatant gaslighting.

Can you please edit name-calling / swipes like that out of your HN comments? It breaks the site guidelines and weakens your point.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Considering the importance of the topic, and provided the linked articles actually contained examples of Google censoring anti-war propaganda, I believe the swipe would have been fully justified.

Highly emotional tone changes how the data affects the reader. If he is right, I would surely better remember next time that Google is in the same ballpark due to the insult hitting hard. If he is wrong, I will know better to ignore such claims in the future without a direct quote or something else that consumes less time than reading an entire linked article.

(comment deleted)
None of your links show Google censoring anti-war propaganda.
Still no. First case I would not even consider censorship. The third one was temporary until Google stopped operating in Russia altogether.

A quote from the second one: "cumulative 45 percent decrease in traffic from Google searches"

There is a difference between "Google does not censor anti-war content" and "Google does censor anti-war content, but usually has an excuse I find acceptable".

When a company puts Jon Lennon's Merry Xmas (War is Over) behind age restriction banner[1], the question stops being "Is there censorship?" and becomes about the logic of such censorship.

>The third one was temporary until Google stopped operating in Russia altogether.

They've censored other things on behest of the Russian government for years[2]. Again, I cannot fathom how people on a tech website like HN can be unaware of such things. This is common knowledge broadly covered on mainstream websites.

---

[1] https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-john-lennon-war-is-over-wa...

[2] https://www.rferl.org/a/google-censors-search-results-after-...

Precisely zero of what you mentioned so far is censoring anti-war content.

Even in the translation case (which I assume you mean by your "excuse" remark) the original source is still available as is. I am not even sure from the description what translation team it was talking about and what does it have to do with Google exactly. "translate company text for the Russian market" this passage sounds like it talks about translating Google's own interfaces, help pages, press releases, or support articles to Russian. E.g. no external voice is being censored.

Google is US company which pays taxes in US. The company just like everyone in US obviously do share responsibility for what US government does. Fortunately Google and it's leadership actually does have political positions even if you dont like it.

In any case as unfortunate owner of Russian passport with friends and collegues in Ukraine I am more affected by Putins war than by anything US does.

So I want Yandex to be seen as part of Kremlin propoganda machine and threated accordingly. This company grew monopoly in many markets in Russia and they directly benefited from Putin regime. Since Ilya Segalovich died company started to be "out of politics" and this complete lack of any political activity lead country to these terrible events.

If that would make you happier, Yandex is selling its News service to Mail.ru.
This only happen now after the war began.
Source for all the claims?
2) https://www.businessinsider.com/yandex-russia-former-news-di...

>The ex-head of news at Russia's largest internet company has advice for his former colleagues: quit.

>Lev Gershenzon worked at Yandex in various roles for four years, according to his LinkedIn profile. He took to Facebook early Tuesday morning to warn people still working at the company — which is one of the largest search engines in Russia — that it was contributing to the censorship of the country's invasion into Ukraine.

>"The fact that a significant part of the Russian population may believe that there is no war is the basis and driving force of this war," Gershenzon wrote, also tagging six of his former coworkers. "Today, Yandex is a key element in hiding information about war. Every day and hour of such "news" costs human lives. And you, my former colleagues, are also responsible for this."

2) https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/16/russia-yandex-news-vk/

>Yandex’s former head of news accused the company of being a ‘key element in hiding information’ from Russians about the war in Ukraine.

3) Result of Yandex's slower crawler and default display mode, although the effect is as described: https://twitter.com/maryilyushina/status/1510930537187319813...

Those are trivial to verify. If you can't do your 5 minutes of research, OP should not feel obliged to humor your attempt to create busy work for them.
Plenty of people cite their work and arguments in contentious discussions.
Russian company follows Russian propaganda rules, that's hardly news. It's pretty clear that concepts like "free press" and "freedom of information" aren't compatible with the Russian regime and expecting such features from a company operating mostly in Russia is kind of pointless. It should be obvious that anything Yandex (or any company targeting Russia, really) should be met with a good deal of scepticism. Companies like Yandex and Baidu can still deliver usable research, though, as long as you realise with what kind of perspective their code was written and their algorithm trained.

In a similar vain, Microsoft has censored "tank man" from their image search (and that of all their image search customers, such as DuckDuckGo). Google is a more transparent about their censorship, usually showing a link or explanation why they remove certain information at the bottom of the page, but it still reflects the values of western civilisation, for example by delisting Russian propaganda such as RT.

These biases are everywhere in all research into this field. The Russian situation is obviously worse than that in many other countries, but you should never forget the bias that AI models from free countries have been trained with either.

> It was tested on 4 (A100 80g) and 8 (V100 32g) GPUs, but is able to work with different configurations with ≈200GB of GPU memory in total which divide weight dimensions correctly (e.g. 16, 64, 128).

so we looking at crazy prices just for inference. RIP to the first guy's cloud billing account who makes this public

so err the cheapest A100 i could find was EUR 10.579,79 .

Suddenly that 3090 i wanted to get, does not seem so expensive....

is this the first GPT-like models which is fully opensource ? none of the others are right ?
Is there a way for developers, who do not have AI/ML background, to get started using this ? I have been curious about GPT-3 but I do not have any AI/ML experience or knowledge. Is there a "approachable" course on Coursera or Udemy that could help me get started with technologies like GPT ?
It's just crazy how much it costs to train such models. As I undestand 800 A100 cards would cost about 25.000.000 without considering the energy costs for 61 days of training.
Lambda labs will rent you an 8xA100 instance for 3 months for $21,900. That would put it at around $2m
Still a bit to expensive for my sideproject ; ) To be honest it seems only big corp can do that kind of stuff. By the way if try to do hyper parameter tuning or some exploration in the architecture it becomes guess 10x or 100x more expensive.
AWS has them in US-EAST1 for $9.83/hr spot with 96 CPU cores, 1152GB of ram, 8 A100s with 320 GB of RAM, 8TB of NVME, and 19 Gbps of EBS bandwidth to load your data quickly.

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/p4/

p4d.24xlarge

An alternative is the p3.16xlarge for 8 V100s with 256GB of GPU RAM but you might as well get the A100s since it's only $0.50/hr cheaper

What are some use cases for something like this? I understand it says "generating and processing text", but is it a replacement for OCR? Or something else?
Chat bots I guess. Or with voice engines - phone bots.
No, it is more like generating a conversations, translating text, summarization texts, writing code, etc.
If I wanted to use it for summarization, what would I have to do?
Postfix "tldr:" to the text being summarized. (Even GPT-2 could do that.)
Wow. Thanks, that's fantastic.