Training a 3.8B LLM to 0.384 CORE for $998 – Hugo Vergnes

vatsachak

Very cool. I wonder what's the minimum amount of money you'd need to get it to score well on AIME

johnnylambada

I don’t blame you for using an LLM to write an article about an LLM that you built. I’ve been reading so much LLM output that now I see it everywhere. I wonder if humans will start writing more like LLMs?

brainless

More and more such experiments. I felt sad for a couple months when I realized that writing code will not be the same since. Now I am on the other side. LLMs are interesting in their own ways but as an engineer, this is a way to unlock a new way of building software. I recently build a Claude-assisted Excel/CSV parser for a US based property management system (tax compliance). Uses Haiku and has a lot of deterministic code to extract column/row combinations to check known formats and finally handing out the headers to Haiku to give us a translation plan to our support columns. These would eventually become part of the software, in a tiny LLM. The gap between training (such tiny LLMs) and inference will shrink. We can consult Claude for edge cases, create sample dataset and train a the tiny LLM on demand so we go to Claude less. The tooling that a project needs is really important. Something I have been feeling as well. Not just in LLM building projects, but regular software projects that are LLM generated.