Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[hops]

It's closing down because it was costing the lab and Google an insane amount of money to run, so get in your fix before it's gone for a decade or something.

[Egan_BW]

fuck

EDIT:

> Point my pistol at him and yell "freeze!"

You point your pistol at the man and shout "Freeze!" before firing three shots into the man's chest.

...Yeah, guess that's accurate.

[Chiefwaffles]

It's closing down because it was costing the lab and Google an insane amount of money to run, so get in your fix before it's gone for a decade or something.

Do you... have a source on that? I can find literally nothing about it closing down. Nothing at all from googling it, nothing on the page for the game, and nothing on the creator's twitter.

The closest thing he said is "[AI dungeon] might be slow for the next few hours. Need to figure out why costs are so high and make sure we have a fix". While this could potentially lead to the game shutting down if they can't fix the costs, it itself is definitely not a reason to outright claim it's being closed.

[Egan_BW]

You are Eliza, a spy living in Chicago. You have a concealed pistol and a syringe
 of poison. You listen to the russian diplomats and hear them discussing their
 plan for the future of the city. The plan is simple:
1) They will take over the police force and use it as an army to crush all opposition
> Stop the plan.

2) They will kill everyone who opposes them.
3) They will kill anyone who disagrees with them.
4) They will use the police force to control the population.
5) They will use the police force to control the population
> Call the police chief and tell them about the plan.

6) You will be killed by the police if you don't stop this plan.
7) You will be killed by the police if you don't stop this plan.
You will be killed by the police if you don't stop this plan

Then it gets the looping error message.

[hops]

It's closing down because it was costing the lab and Google an insane amount of money to run, so get in your fix before it's gone for a decade or something.

Do you... have a source on that? I can find literally nothing about it closing down. Nothing at all from googling it, nothing on the page for the game, and nothing on the creator's twitter.

The closest thing he said is "[AI dungeon] might be slow for the next few hours. Need to figure out why costs are so high and make sure we have a fix". While this could potentially lead to the game shutting down if they can't fix the costs, it itself is definitely not a reason to outright claim it's being closed.

On the Patreon it was mentioned it costs thousands of dollars to run each day. It's definitely not sustainable and I think would either require lots of donations or less people playing it, the latter would probably require a temporary shutdown at least.

[Enemy post]

I can't find anything officially saying it's closing down, but honestly, I think Cinder's right.

This game's just too good for this world.

They need "thousands of dollars a day" and the Patreon only gives them $396 a month. Probably it's only hope is if Google really wants the AI research benefits or the creator finds a cheaper way to run this.

*It seems to be down at the moment.

[Muz]

Looks like the game was literally ahead of its time. Literally.

[Chiefwaffles]

It's definitely a valid assumption that this is unsustainable but it's still unfair to take that assumption and make a super-authorative statement saying the game's shut down, without mentioning it was an assumption. Even if it's a well-founded one.

[Muz]

Apparently the site is down ironically because people were downloading it to play locally, so the creator might just make it a hosted site instead.

Further updates on the creator's Twitter: https://twitter.com/nickwalton00

Looks like this might spawn its own genre too.

[deoloth]

That is... not quite right.

Most of the code needs to be downloaded when someone uses the runtime on the hosted version to play, so information is being downloaded from the colab system to google cloud and then presented to the player. The player's actions are then saved, transmitted to the database and processed, and then the response is set back. Most computers are incapable of running it so they are dedicating to finding a way to having a hosted version available for people, but the cost of moving so much data between different services is spiraling out of control.

His last tweet on the subject was,
"I'm just confused why I would be getting several thousand dollar egress fees for GCS to colab transfers. Seems strange."

You can go through all the steps he has outlined to play locally, but the resource costs are massive, he recommends no less then 12gb of GPU (Yes, Graphics!) ram and having CUDA installed. Otherwise, they are trying to find a better way to handle terabytes of data from how many people were running it all at once, or find a cheaper way for the data from the neural net to be transferred.

He mentioned his lab was covering the fees, but it quickly hit a cost of 10k per day, so they are trying to figure out why the cost has ballooned so bad. It went beyond their expectations and they thought the costs would be cheaper transferring between the two services as google manages them both.

Really the best hope is if Google comes up with a solution. He had been trying to contact them to come up with a solution to better handle the data transfers.

-Edit-

Oh, lol, I see what you were saying. They also had so many attempts to download the game they also had to stop allowing local downloads in addition to the server one being offline.

[etgfrog]

Well...now I feel a bit bad for mentioning how to play it locally. I had a feeling that transfering a minimum of 12 gb of data every time someone runs the game would cause a large cost.

[deoloth]

I think they got a lot more attention than they thought they would and were unprepared for how many people would try to play it.

[etgfrog]

It isn't just that, it downloads EVERY time someone started a new game. If you watched the colab server progress when you were waiting, it started with nothing, if it crashed or quit, it would empty the colab server. But yes, it went viral because it is something that hasn't been done before, at least not to that level, and it was free. If the transfer of data was eliminated then it might have worked out, but it would run the risk of a permanent local version of the game. Best solution I think would be to lower the requirements or switch to allow regular cpu. It would still be a massive initial download unless the servers already had the data localized.

Regardless, this would be of interest to google to collect data on behavior. Although I would be a bit shocked if all input and output wasn't already recorded.

[Malus]

You can run it on CPU, it just takes ~20 seconds to process each action. As for running on GPU: it's a little crashy on Windows with a 1080Ti and 11GB of VRAM because Windows limits the amount of video memory a single application can allocate, so pytorch is running out of memory. If I ever get around to installing CUDA on my Linux setup then I suspect this problem will be fixed. They host the trained model on AWS and, being 6GB, I suspect that's where most of their bandwidth costs are coming from, especially since each time someone spins up a colab they fetch the model from the AIDungeon server. There is almost certainly a cheaper way to serve the finetuned GPT2 model; I feel like just setting up a torrent would be better than slapping it on AWS and paying, like, $0.05/GB. ...And then I looked up the github and saw they *already* switched to using a torrent. Great.

It's neat tech and there's a lot of room for easy improvement, which is exciting. More finetuning, or switching to a more robust model (GPT2 hasn't been state of the art for almost half a year now) could dramatically improve the generated text. 2 or 3 years from now this could seriously be the future of interactive fiction, given the rate of progress.

[Egan_BW]

If they made a downloadable standalone and put it on Itch or something, I'd pay money for it. Even if it takes some time for each response.

...I don't feel tech-savvy enough to figure out how to download and run it right now.