Language Model Development: The Current Situation

An AI enthusiast is documenting the process of building a language model (LM) from scratch. The latest update, regarding the sixth day of work, focuses on system stabilization and model training.

Challenges and Solutions

Initially, the use of DataParallel on Windows created bottlenecks, slowing down training compared to using a single GPU. Despite this, the developer chose to continue working on Windows to make the process accessible to beginners. Training required more resources than expected: after 25,000 steps, the model was trained on approximately 400 million tokens, an insufficient number for a model of this size.

Preliminary Results and Future Prospects

Despite the limited amount of training data, the model has shown promising results, with good sentence structure. However, more in-depth training is needed, with approximately 300,000 steps, to obtain a quality pre-trained model. The author plans to have a benchmark ready by the eighth day, to showcase the model's capabilities.