Estimate Complexity

Step-by-Step Reasoning

1. Model Parameters: GPT-3 has approximately 175 billion parameters. This is a key factor as the computational cost scales with the number of parameters.

2. Training Data Size: GPT-3 was trained on a dataset of about 570 GB of text. Assuming an average of roughly 1 byte per token (due to subword tokenization in models like GPT), this corresponds to approximately 570 billion tokens. (Note: Some estimates use 4 bytes per token, leading to ~140 billion tokens, but the 1-byte assumption aligns with common large-scale estimates for FLOPs.)

3. FLOPs Formula for Transformers: For large transformer models like GPT-3, the total number of floating-point operations (FLOPs) required for training is roughly estimated as 6 * (number of parameters) * (number of tokens processed). This accounts for forward and backward passes, with the constant 6 being a standard approximation for attention and MLP computations in transformers.

4. Calculation:

   • Number of parameters (P) = 175 × 10^9
   • Number of tokens (N) = 570 × 10^9
   • Total FLOPs ≈ 6 × P × N = 6 × 175 × 10^9 × 570 × 10^9
   • First, 175 × 570 = 99,750
   • 6 × 99,750 = 598,500
   • Thus, 598,500 × 10^{18} = 5.985 × 10^{23} FLOPs

5. Hardware Validation: GPT-3 training reportedly took about 34 days on 1024 V100 GPUs (each ~15 TFLOPs). This translates to roughly 8.36 × 10^5 GPU-hours, yielding approximately 4.5 × 10^{22} FLOPs based on hardware specs. However, the formula-based estimate of 6 × 10^{23} is higher due to approximations in the constant and token count, but it's the standard rough estimate used in AI literature for large models.

Estimated Total FLOPs

Approximately 6 × 10^{23} FLOPs (or 598 × 10^{21}, but commonly rounded to 10^{23} for simplicity). This is a rough estimate; actual values can vary based on exact tokenization, optimizer efficiency, and parallelization.