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Coogan: $2 Billion Is Enough to Train a Near-Frontier AI Model

John Coogan · Apple Considers New AI partnership · Jul 1, 2025 · at 7:02

John Coogan discusses foundation model training costs and the viability of Mira Murati's new AI startup, Thinking Machines.

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“I think the fact of the matter is like two billion dollars is enough to do a GPT four level run to do a deep seek style run. And so you, if you take all the best practices from deep seek V three and R one, like the reasoning model, and you spend the money to go do the training and you pull all the data together and maybe you're not completely stealing the data from the GPT four API, but you're getting it somewhat legitimately through You know, these data brokers like Mercore and scale and whatnot, like you should be able to get a, you know, near the frontier level model done.”

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