Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedReiner Pope: belief
29 Apr 2026 Dwarkesh Podcast Reiner Pope – The math behind how LLMs are trained and served
“I think if you do it with a spreadsheet and actually model it out, you might notice when the money’s going down the drain.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Reiner Pope
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 29 Apr 2026
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
Transcript context
…Billions of dollars worth of compute just flowed in the other direction. Right? I think if you do it with a spreadsheet and actually model it out, you might notice when the money’s going down the drain. All of these end up being close in, as modeled here. This 30% may have been a little bit too generous. So let’s say something like 1.5 here, and leave this as a one here. I think at this point, you can almost read it off. The number of inference tokens should be about the same as the number of pre-training tokens, which should be about the same as the number of RL tokens, within factors that we’re not able to reason about. Sorry for making a basic algebra mistake. It seems like there should be fewer RL tokens than pre-training tokens?…
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