Estimate Complexity

To estimate the total number of FLOPs (Floating Point Operations) required to train GPT-3, we'll break down the process into several steps and make reasonable assumptions based on the information we have about GPT-3 and typical training processes for large language models.

1. Model size and parameters: GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters. This is a crucial piece of information as it directly impacts the number of FLOPs required for training.

2. Training data size: GPT-3 was trained on a large dataset, but we don't know the exact size. For this estimation, let's assume it's similar to the dataset used for training GPT-2, which is around 40GB of text data. This is a rough estimate and the actual size could be larger.

3. Training steps: The number of training steps depends on the batch size and the number of epochs (or passes) through the dataset. Let's assume a batch size of 1,000 tokens (which is reasonable for a model of this size) and 10 epochs. This gives us 40,000,000,000 tokens / 1,000 tokens/batch = 40,000,000 batches, and 40,000,000 batches * 10 epochs = 400,000,000 training steps.

4. FLOPs per training step: The number of FLOPs required for each training step depends on the model architecture and the specific operations performed during training. For a transformer-based model like GPT-3, the most computationally intensive operations are matrix multiplications. Let's assume that each training step requires approximately 10 FLOPs per parameter (this is a rough estimate and the actual number could be different). This gives us 175,000,000,000 parameters * 10 FLOPs/parameter = 1,750,000,000,000 FLOPs per training step.

5. Total FLOPs: Now, we can calculate the total number of FLOPs required for training by multiplying the number of FLOPs per training step by the number of training steps. This gives us 1,750,000,000,000 FLOPs/step * 400,000,000 steps = 700,000,000,000,000,000,000 FLOPs.

So, our rough estimate for the total number of FLOPs required to train GPT-3 is 700 quadrillion FLOPs. This is a very rough estimate and the actual number could be different, but it gives us a sense of the scale of the computation involved in training a large language model like GPT-3.