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Comment by ein0p | Hacker News Reader

It's hardly Google's problem that nobody else has a million cores, wouldn't you agree? Should they not publish the result at all if it's using more than a handful of cores so that anyone in academia can reproduce it? That'd be rather limiting.

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Well, a goal of most science is to be reproducible, and it couldn't be reproduced, merely for technical reasons (and so we shared as much data from the runs as possible so people could verify our results). This sort of thing comes up when CERN is the only place that can run an experiment and nobody can verify it.

It is probably reproducible, if you have the requisite million cores. That isn't even difficult today - a million cores is about 100 GPUs.

Actually it IS google's problem. They don't publish through traditional academic venues unless it suits them (much like OpenAI/Anthropic, often snubbing places like NeurIPS due to not wanting to MIT open source their code/models which peer reviewers demand) and them demanding so many GPUs chokes supply for the rest of the field - a field which they rely on the free labor of to make complimentary technologies to their models.

It doesn't choke anything. Anyone can go to GCP or other cloud providers and get as many GPUs as they need, within reason.

> Google's problem that nobody else has a million cores, wouldn't you agree

On the contrary - their advantage. They know it and they can make outlandish claims that no one will disprove

For a while, anyway.

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