Equation 3 · Dense, Sparse, and Distilled: Comparing Approaches to Frontier Model Capacity
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Symbol D
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Fix the vocabulary first. Let N be total parameters, the parameters actually used to process a given token, D training tokens, and M the memory that must be resident to serve. For the dense decoder-only transformer that remains the default architecture [ 1 ] , = N and M N . Every method below breaks one of those two identities, and which one it breaks determines what it is good for.
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