Equation 11 · Part 3 · What Alignment Actually Costs
Symbol C_pre
What this part means
re occurs below the fraction bar. The quantity above the bar is divided by this expression; zero is excluded as a denominator.
Its job in the formula
re occurs below the fraction bar. The quantity above the bar is divided by this expression; zero is excluded as a denominator.
Full expression→Symbol C_pre→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
That fraction has moved substantially since 2022. DeepSeek’s R1 model provides the clearest recent public case, because both its pretraining and its reinforcement learning phase were disclosed in enough technical detail for an independent estimate to be built. Epoch AI’s own reconstruction puts DeepSeek-V3’s pretraining at about 5.3 million US dollars, based on 2,048 H800 GPUs run at roughly 2 US dollars per GPU-hour over the reported training schedule, and the initial R1-Zero reinforcement learning phase at about 1 million US dollars, assuming similar hardware utilisation to the pretraining run [ 11 ] . That is roughly seventeen to twenty percent of the pretraining figure — an order of…
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.
Open the illustrated subscripts: which member of a family? guide →
See this notation across published equations →
Sources cited in the surrounding passage
- [11] What Went Into Training DeepSeek-R1? ↗
- [10] Why GPT-5 Used Less Training Compute Than GPT-4.5 (But GPT-6 Probably Won't) ↗
These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.