DeepMind in “very early stage” talks with National Grid to reduce UK energy use
The DeepMind datacenter project was very interesting, but a lot of the ML people I spoke to were quite dubious about how much of it was genuinely down to new AI/neural networks, and how much of it was Google PR to justify how much they spent on DeepMind.<p>> DeepMind trained a neural network to more accurately predict future cooling requirements, in turn reducing the power usage of the cooling system by 40 percent.<p>But when you look at the DeepMind blog post (<a href="https://deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-data-centre-cooling-bill-40/" rel="nofollow">https://deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-data-ce...</a>), it looks like the 40% model is comparing to a baseline of doing nothing.  So the question is : is this really something you require an AI research powerhouse like DeepMind for, or is it something a regular data science team could do?