Symbol N_c

The passage around this formula

By this point compute had become the binding constraint, and the field did not know how to spend it. Kaplan and colleagues characterised the relationship empirically, finding that cross-entropy loss scales as a power law in model size, dataset size and compute, with trends spanning more than seven orders of magnitude, and concluding that compute-efficient training meant very large models on relatively modest data, stopped well short of convergence [ 16 ] . The functional form is the important part: $L(N) \approx \left(\frac{N_c}{N}\right)^{\alpha_N}$. Hoffmann and colleagues then trained over four hundred models and reached a different allocation: model size and training tokens should scale in roughly equal proportion, and…

Read this part in the article →