Assertion Supported AI assessment confidence: 95% certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Soldaini: Training LLMs on longer sequences causes quadratic compute slowdown

Luca Soldaini · Open Source AI Strikes Back — Inside Ai2’s OLMo 3 ‘Thinking" · Nov 20, 2025 · at 52:41

Luca Soldaini is an AI researcher at AI2 (Allen Institute for AI) discussing why long-context extension is deferred to late-stage AI model training.

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“It's because the longer the input that a model is trained on, the slower it is. The rate at which it gets slower, it's higher than the length of a context. It's a quadratic slowdown.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Luca Soldaini

Assertion Not checkable as stated
Soldaini: Most open AI models are open weights, not open source
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Luca Soldaini Nov 20, 2025 ▶ 10:52 Open Source AI Strikes Back — Inside Ai2’s OLMo 3 ‘Thinking"
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Luca Soldaini Nov 20, 2025 ▶ 1:26:12 Open Source AI Strikes Back — Inside Ai2’s OLMo 3 ‘Thinking"
Disclosure
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“We're not just releasing the final models. We're releasing, you know, the entire recipe we followed to get this model. So the data, the intermediate states, the evaluation frameworks, all the details, all the bits that people need to know to make models like O…”
Luca Soldaini Nov 20, 2025 ▶ 1:46 Open Source AI Strikes Back — Inside Ai2’s OLMo 3 ‘Thinking"
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Soldaini: Frontier AI labs limit final pre-training runs to two months
“I think it's standard practice among the frontier labs to try to cap your big final pre-training run to two months not more than that.”
Luca Soldaini Nov 20, 2025 ▶ 47:21 Open Source AI Strikes Back — Inside Ai2’s OLMo 3 ‘Thinking"
Insight
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“But they're like technical decisions in how you set up your model that you can have the best data in the world. And your model will not be able to reason over many, many tokens. So it doesn't matter in the sense that you can't train the model on bad data, but …”
Luca Soldaini Nov 20, 2025 ▶ 53:40 Open Source AI Strikes Back — Inside Ai2’s OLMo 3 ‘Thinking"
Disclosure
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“There's like a pool of about 10 trillion tokens from which we have like an algorithm also fully open source. To like sample about six trillion tokens that we use during training.”
Luca Soldaini Nov 20, 2025 ▶ 6:07 Open Source AI Strikes Back — Inside Ai2’s OLMo 3 ‘Thinking"
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