OpenAI Five
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (and vaguely helped with this).<p>For me, one of the most amazing things about this work is that a small group of people (admittedly well funded) can show up and do what used to be the purview of only giant corporations.<p>The 256 P100 optimizers are less than $400/hr. You can rent 128000 preemptible vcpus for another $1280/hr. Toss in some more support GPUs and we're at maybe $2500/hr all in. That sounds like a lot, until you realize that some of these results ran for just a weekend.<p>In days past, researchers would never have had access to this kind of computing unless they worked for a national lab. Now it's just a budgetary decision. We're getting closer to a (more) level playing field, and this is a wonderful example.