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Taylor: Pre-training a fourth-best foundation model offers highly questionable ROI

Bret Taylor · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · Apr 15, 2025 · at 1:01:10

Bret Taylor, OpenAI Board Chair and Sierra co-founder, discusses the economic viability and capital dynamics of training foundation models versus frontier AI models.

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“If you're pre-training a foundation model that's the fourth best that's gonna cost you a lot of money, and the return on that investment is, is probably fairly questionable, because why use your fourth best large language model versus a frontier model or an open source one for Meta?”

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