hitu (@hitu_monke) “THE TRAINING PIPELINE BEHIND EVERY LLM YOU USE NOW RUNS IN FOUR HOURS ON A RENTE” — TopicDigg

THE TRAINING PIPELINE BEHIND EVERY LLM YOU USE NOW RUNS IN FOUR HOURS ON A RENTED MACHINE karpathy's nanochat walks the whole thing end to end. tokenization, pretraining, fine-tuning, all the way to a chat ui you can actually talk to. someone wrapped it in a one-click template that provisions 8 h100s and starts the run for you the reflex is to say training got cheap. it didn't. frontier runs still cost what they cost what got cheap is the skeleton. scale is the expensive part, not the steps. every stage in that hundred-million-dollar pipeline is now something you can execute over an afternoon and watch fail in its own specific way and that's the real unlock. the black box didn't open because someone explained it better. explanations were never the bottleneck. it opened because the machine became rentable by the hour and the setup became a button you don't understand pretraining by reading about pretraining. you understand it the first time you run one and your base model answers your question with more questions