Yann Dubois, Post-Training Frontiers Co-Lead at OpenAI, discusses the relationship between pre-training model scale, explicit thinking tokens, and inference efficiency.
“If you have larger models the amount of thinking time, so the amount of tokens they will think for will usually decrease. And the way that you can think about it is that metaphorically, the model already thinks through its weights when it generates a certain token. So you can decrease the number of, like, tokens that it needs to generate for thinking by kind of, like, increasing the size of the model. That you are training. So, so oftentimes if you just increase the model size, if you basically train pre-train larger models you will get better efficiency.”
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