← Back to context

Comment by TSiege

10 hours ago

Any sources on training costs in free fall? My understanding was training costs are proportional to model size. Is it just that compute costs are falling?

MiMo RL'd their latest models for $3.5M (million, not billion). It's hardware, software, and algos

https://mimo.xiaomi.com/rl/

Also look to the history of stable diffusion

  • I believe that’s post-training, not pre-training.

    • > I believe that’s post-training, not pre-training

      Aren't AI companies already butting against the limits of usable training data?

      Outside of undiscovered techniques, additional costly pre-training will likely yield diminishing returns if you've already scraped the whole internet and destructively scanned as many 20th century books as you could lay your hands on.

  • Training costs are not in free fall, and not every "post training" process is equal, Everyone does this differently. The costs certainly haven't gone down, to train a new 10T param model from scratch, like at all.

    You cannot point at Xiaomis tiny model and compare it to training a 10T param model. The levels of dunning krueger are getting out of hand.

    You also arent calculating the salaries of the people involved, of which there's only a few thousand worldwide in your hiring pool.

    • > You also arent calculating the salaries of the people involved, of which there's only a few thousand worldwide in your hiring pool.

      There were probably a few dozen 20 years ago, and the existing pool grew from somewhere. AI (nee machine learning) is not rocket science - but it is a science, so it rewards those who are literate, curious, can hypothesize, experiment and learn from results to gain an intuition. I bet most statistics-adjacent professionals (millions, worldwide) can move laterally into AI research and excel at it. Nevermind AI has been among the most-in-demand undergrad programs since ChatGPT dropped. The only limited pool is for celebrity AI talent.

      1 reply →

    • you haven't cited any examples, nor acknowledged this is how everything in computing has gone, DK is a two way street I suppose

      stable diffusion is an excellent example, the price to train today's or yesterday's frontier is the analogy, many more people will be able to train up what we have today, especially as more of the pipeline is open sourced and the knowhow distills

      2 replies →