this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2025
883 points (98.1% liked)

Technology

61206 readers
4284 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/53805638

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] bestboyfriendintheworld@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

True, but training is one-off. And as you say, a factor 100x less costs with this new model. Therefore NVidia just saw 99% of their expected future demand for AI chips evaporate

It might also lead to 100x more power to train new models.

[–] ArchRecord@lemm.ee 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I doubt that will be the case, and I'll explain why.

As mentioned in this article,

SFT (supervised fine-tuning), a standard step in AI development, involves training models on curated datasets to teach step-by-step reasoning, often referred to as chain-of-thought (CoT). It is considered essential for improving reasoning capabilities. DeepSeek challenged this assumption by skipping SFT entirely, opting instead to rely on reinforcement learning (RL) to train the model. This bold move forced DeepSeek-R1 to develop independent reasoning abilities, avoiding the brittleness often introduced by prescriptive datasets.

This totally changes the way we think about AI training, which is why while OpenAI spent $100m on training GPT-4, running an expected 500,000 GPUs, DeepSeek used about 50,000, and likely spent that same roughly 10% of the cost.

So while operation, and even training, is now cheaper, it's also substantially less compute intensive to train models.

And not only is there less data than ever to train models on that won't cause them to get worse by regurgitating other worse quality AI-generated content, but even if additional datasets were scrapped entirely in favor of this new RL method, there's a point at which an LLM is simply good enough.

If you need to auto generate a corpo-speak email, you can already do that without many issues. Reformat notes or user input? Already possible. Classify tickets by type? Done. Write a silly poem? That's been possible since pre-ChatGPT. Summarize a webpage? The newest version of ChatGPT will probably do just as well as the last at that.

At a certain point, spending millions of dollars for a 1% performance improvement doesn't make sense when the existing model just already does what you need it to do.

I'm sure we'll see development, but I doubt we'll see a massive increase in training just because the cost to run and train the model has gone down.

Thank you. Sounds like good news.