Equation 18 · Part 1 · OpenAI Model Systems from First Principles: Weights, Post-Training, and Inference Compute
Symbol C_total
What this part means
otal is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
Its job in the formula
otal is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
Full expression→Symbol C_total→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
…wrong objective for a served product. Compute-optimal training minimises loss for a fixed training budget. A commercial system minimises total cost over training and inference, and when Q is very large the third term in dominates. The rational response is to train smaller models for longer than the compute-optimal recipe suggests, because every parameter removed is paid back on every one of Q requests. The existence of small, cheap variants in each OpenAI generation is consistent with exactly…
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Sources cited in the surrounding passage
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