Equation 12 · Part 2 · What Alignment Actually Costs
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What this part means
Approximately equal to; the equality is not exact.
Its job in the formula
Approximately equal to; the equality is not exact.
Full expression→≈→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
Two data points three years apart, 0.018 for InstructGPT and 0.17 to 0.19 for DeepSeek-R1, describe a ratio that has grown roughly tenfold. Epoch AI’s broader analysis of post-training compute trends confirms the direction independently of any single model: reasoning-focused post-training compute has scaled by roughly a factor of ten every four months, far outpacing pretraining’s historical growth of roughly four to five times a year, and the analysts note this cannot continue much longer, because tripling post-training compute is on a path to soon mean tripling the entire training budget [ 10 ] . That finding needs one careful qualification for an article about…
Learn the underlying idea
A variable is a named place for a value. Its letter is a local label: x can mean position in one formula and a data point in another.
Open the illustrated variables: a letter stands for a value guide →
Sources cited in the surrounding passage
These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.