The Billion-Dollar Price Tag of Building AI

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A new study shows that expensive computing power and top researcher salaries means the cost of building AI is doubling every nine months.

with TIME, Dario Amodei, CEO of AI company Anthropic predicted that the cost to develop the next generation of AI systems that will be released later this year would be around $1 billion. This trend suggests that the generation after that would cost more like $10 billion.planning to build a $100 billion supercomputer to build and run AI models.

“The cost of the largest AI training runs is growing by a factor of two to three per year since 2016, and that puts billion-dollar price tags on the horizon by 2027, maybe sooner,” says Ben Cottier, a staff researcher at Epoch AI who led the study. This will mean only very well-funded companies will be able to compete, cementing the power of already powerful firms, he warns.

The researchers found that the cost of the computational power required to train the models is doubling every nine months. This is a prodigious rate of growth—at this rate, the cost of the hardware and electricity needed to build cutting-edge AI systems alone would be in the billions by later this decade, without accounting for other costs such as employee compensation.

However, the plans touted by Amodei and others outstrip even this rapid rate of growth. Costs could well increase beyond the historical rate for the next couple of years, before settling back down to the original trend in the longer term, says Cottier.Accessing and powering the required computational horsepower is just part of the cost involved in developing the most sophisticated AI systems. Companies must also pay the researchers developing the algorithms.

They estimated labor costs for four AI models—OpenAI’s GPT-3 and GPT-4 models, a replication of GPT-3 developed by researchers at Meta named OPT-175B, andWhile a lot of discussion has focused on the escalating costs of accessing the specialized semiconductor chips required to train and run advanced AI systems—Amodei hashis astronomical projections of future costs to chips—Epoch AI’s results suggest that compensation is also a significant cost driver.

 

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