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Equation 14 · Part 2 · Dense, Sparse, and Distilled: Comparing Approaches to Frontier Model Capacity

subscript

NaN_a
subscript

What this part means

The lower label selects a particular version, component, or indexed member of the quantity. For example, x₀ and xₜ can be values at different positions.

Its job in the formula

A subscript distinguishes a version, component, step, or member of a quantity. It does not automatically mean multiplication.

The passage around this formula

The economics are attractive and frequently overstated. Training compute scales with NaN_a , not N , so a sparse model can hold far more knowledge for the same training FLOPs. Patterson and colleagues, computing energy and carbon for several large models including Switch Transformer and GPT-3, found that large but sparsely activated networks can consume less than one tenth the energy of large dense networks without sacrificing accuracy [ 10 ] .

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Learn the underlying idea

A subscript is a label attached below a symbol. It often selects a time step, component, category, or member of a sequence.

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Sources cited in the surrounding passage

These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.