alt Hacker NewsFacebook had talks already years ago (10+) - nobody was allowed to share real numbers, but several facebook employed where allowed to share that the company has measured savings from optimizations. Reading between the lines, a 0.1% efficiency improvement to some parts of Facebook would save them $100,000 a month (again real numbers were never publicly shared so there is a range - it can't be less than $20,000), and so they had teams of people whose job it was to find those improvements.
Most of the savings seemed to come from HVAC costs, followed by buying less computers and in turn less data centers. I'm sure these days saving memory is also a big deal but it doesn't seem to have been then.
The above was already the case 10 years ago, so LLMs are at most another factor added on.
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I've heard of some people getting banned from FB to save memory space? Surely that can't be the case but I swear I've seen something like that
> LLMs are at most another factor added on
At most... Think 10x rather than 0.1x or 1x.
I don't have many regrets about having spent my career in (relatively) tiny companies by comparison, but it sure does sound fun to be on the other side for this kind of thing - the scale where micro-optimizations have macro impact.
In startups I've put more effort into squeezing blood from a stone for far less change; even if the change was proportionally more significant to the business. Sometimes it would be neat to say "something I did saved $X million dollars or saved Y kWh of energy" or whatever.