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Comment by dzdt | Hacker News Reader

Retracted! See below; compute is disclosed and is not that crazy. For this project their training hardware used 4 Nvidia K80's.

Original comment: I think they leave it out because otherwise the standard response to their work would be "no surprise they get better results than anyone else, they are using two orders of magnitude more compute time than anyone else!" Not highlighting the computational expense makes their results look more impressive.

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Also, because they are focusing heavily on the RL part of the modeling. They obviously have obscene amounts of available compute, but that is not their competitive advantage.

what exactly do you mean? Are you saying that RL requires less compute?

I would say having an obscene amount of compute is definitely a big competitive advantage, especially over a lot of small academic research labs.

> We train each GQN model simultaneously on 4 NVidia K80 GPUs for 2 million gradient steps. The values of the hyper-parameters used for optimisation are detailed in Table S1, and we show the effect of model size on final performance in Fig. S4.

> The values of all hyper-parameters were selected by performing informal search. We did not perform a systematic grid search owing to the high computational cost.

That's nowhere near an obscene amount of computing power for any serious ML project.

Wow. Okay I retract my snide comment. Thanks for finding that.

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