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Generating synthetic data could impose a 5x compute tax on model training

Dwarkesh Patel · AI Scaling, Alignment, and the Path to Superintelligence — With Dwarkesh Patel · May 15, 2024 · at 23:03

Dwarkesh Patel explains the technical compute overhead of generating and selecting synthetic data for AI model training to host Alex Kantrowitz.

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“It will make training more expensive because instead of just doing one backward pass, you now potentially have to do many forward passes because at each forward pass, you're going to come up with some output. Then the model has to decide which of those outputs was the best. Now we're going to train on the best of those outputs. It could like Be a five X tax on training.”

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