Stumbled on a stat about AI training costs that blew my mind

I was reading through this article on the MIT Technology Review site last night. Turns out training a single large model like GPT-3 cost around $4.6 million in compute time. That's more than I'll probably make in my whole career managing properties. It really makes you think about how much money is behind the free chatbots we use every day. Has anyone else run across a crazy stat like that that changed how you see AI?

2 comments

2 Comments

wren3075d ago

I saw a similar number in a different article that said training GPT-3 used about 1,287 megawatt-hours of electricity. That's enough to power an average American home for over 100 years. It put a lot of things in perspective for me, because I always figured the big cost was the R&D or paying engineers, not just the raw electricity and computing hardware. For me, it changed how I think about free services online in general. Nothing is really free, someone is just footing the bill upfront while they figure out how to make it pay off later. It makes you wonder how much of our everyday internet usage is riding on that kind of invisible spending.

rosejackson5d ago

Honestly yeah that really put it into perspective for me too. I started thinking about all those "free" email services and social media and realized we're all just burning through electricity and hardware while someone else figures out the business model later.