Simon Willison’s Weblog

7th March 2024 - Link Blog

Training great LLMs entirely from ground zero in the wilderness as a startup. Yi Tay has a really interesting perspective on training LLMs, having worked at Google Brain before co-founding an independent startup, Reka.

At Google the clusters are provided for you. On the outside, Yi finds himself bargaining for cluster resources from a wide range of vendors—and running into enormous variance in quality.

“We’ve seen clusters that range from passable (just annoying problems that are solvable with some minor SWE hours) to totally unusable clusters that fail every few hours due to a myriad of reasons.”