The Real Cost of a Fine-Tune, End to End

Almost every fine-tuning cost estimate is a GPU-hour calculation, and the GPU hours are usually the smallest of the four terms. This page is deliberately parametric: prices in this field move faster than a page can be revised, so what is offered here is the structure and the derivations, with every figure marked as an assumption you replace.

The four terms

ONE-OFF, per attempt (and you will make more than one attempt)

1. data curation hours, labelling, or teacher generation

2. compute GPU-hours x rate, x number of runs

The Real Cost of a Fine-Tune, End to End

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