It took Googleβs Transformer model from 2017 a whopping $900 to train. πΈ
This in contrast to the $191 million Google spent on Gemini Ultra sounds like a bargain! π°
Gemini Ultra required 50 billion petaFLOPS (one petaFLOP equals one quadrillion FLOPs). π€ Compared to OpenAIβs GPT-4, which required 21 billion petaFLOPS, at a cost of $78 million. π‘
But, why? π€ Compute, data, and expertise. All three come at a great cost! βοΈππ‘
Google recently made Gemini-1.5-Flash fine-tuning free, as it's almost impossible for regular businesses to justify an in-house trained foundational model! π
This barrier of cost is going to result in fewer new foundational models/less competition and more fine-tunes! ππ