Epoch AI: Less Than 30% of R&D Compute Goes to Final Training Runs

New analysis reveals that the headline-grabbing training runs behind frontier models represent a fraction of the compute labs actually spend — most goes to iteration, experimentation, and evaluation.

Epoch AI published analysis Monday showing that across OpenAI, MiniMax, and z.ai, less than 30% of R&D compute spending goes to final training runs, as @EpochAIResearch reported. The bulk of compute is consumed by ablation studies, hyperparameter searches, data pipeline iteration, and evaluation infrastructure.

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