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Published · transcript-backed

Alessio Fanelli: belief

16 Aug 2023 Latent Space The Mathematics of Training LLMs — with Quentin Anthony of Eleuther AI

“I think a lot of times the focus is on tokens parameter ratio in the training dataset and people don't think as much about the actual flops per GPU, which you're going to mention later in the blog post too, in terms of how much you can get out.”

— Alessio Fanelli

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Alessio Fanelli
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
16 Aug 2023
Publisher
Latent Space

Transcript context

…Okay. But the core equation here is that not the cost of compute, but the compute required to turn a transformer model is roughly equal to tau times T, where like T is the, where tau is the hardware setup throughput that you have. So number of GPUs times the actual flops per GPU. And then T is the time spent. I think people can visualize that pretty easily. It's basically like how many GPUs do you have and how much do you let them run for? And the things that come to it that people have read before in the Chinchilla paper in a way, and the OpenAI scaling law is that you can then equal this to 6PD, where P is the number of parameters in the model and D is the size of the, of the dataset in tokens. So talk a little bit about how people should think about the two. I think a lot of times the focus is on tokens parameter ratio in the training dataset and people don't think as much about the actual flops per GPU, which you're going to mention later in the blog post too, in terms of how much you can get out. So how should people think about this when they're building a model and where should they go to this equation as they're starting to think about training their own transformer-based model?…

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