What are the biggest challenges in LLM training right now? or How much data do you really need for ef

18 Replies, 1585 Views

"What are the biggest challenges in LLM training right now?"

Hey folks!

So, I've been diving deep into LLM training lately, and man, it's *not* easy. The biggest headaches?

1. Data quality – Garbage in, garbage out, right? Cleaning and curating datasets is a nightmare.
2. Compute costs – GPUs ain't cheap, and training a decent model burns cash like crazy.
3. Overfitting – Getting a model to generalize well? Ugh, so tricky.

And don’t even get me started on fine-tuning vs. full training debates.

What’s your take? Anyone found workarounds for these LLM training struggles?

(Also, sorry for typos – typing this on my phone lol.)

---

*Word count: ~90*
Totally feel you on the data quality struggle! One thing that’s helped me is using tools like Dedupe or OpenRefine to clean datasets before llm training.

Also, have you tried synthetic data generation? Tools like Gretel.ai can help fill gaps when real data is messy or scarce.

Compute costs are brutal tho. Cloud credits (like from GCP or AWS startups programs) can ease the pain a bit.
Overfitting is the worst! I’ve had some luck with early stopping and dropout layers, but it’s still hit or miss.

For llm training, have you checked out Hugging Face’s PEFT (Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning)? Saves a ton on compute and time.

Also, smaller models like Phi-3 are surprisingly good if you tweak ’em right.
Data quality is a nightmare, but crowdsourcing platforms like Scale AI or Label Studio can help with annotation.

For compute, spot instances on AWS are way cheaper if you can handle interruptions.

And yeah, overfitting… ugh. Try LoRA for fine-tuning—less params, better generalization.
Man, the compute costs alone make me wanna cry. Have you looked into RunPod or Lambda Labs? They’re cheaper than big cloud providers for llm training.

Also, data pruning! Tools like Datatrove can cut down noise before training.

Overfitting? More data augmentation, maybe?
Wow, thanks for all the tips! Didn’t expect so many replies.

Gonna try PEFT and LoRA first—sounds like they’ll save me some $$$.

Anyone here actually used Gretel.ai for synthetic data? Wondering if it’s worth the hype.

(Also, *yes* to spot instances—forgot about those!)
The fine-tuning vs. full training debate is endless lol. I’m team fine-tuning—why reinvent the wheel?

For llm training, Weights & Biases is killer for tracking experiments without blowing your budget.

And yeah, data quality… *sigh*. Sometimes manual review is the only way.
Overfitting’s my arch-nemesis. Try mixout or stochastic depth—weird names, but they help!

For data, Common Crawl is a goldmine if you’ve got the patience to filter it.

Compute? *cries in poor*. Shared GPU clusters are a lifesaver.
LLM training is like trying to tame a wild animal.

For data, Snorkel’s weak supervision saves hours of labeling.

And hey, Colab Pro isn’t perfect, but it’s way cheaper than spinning up your own cluster.
Data quality is everything. Cleanlab’s auto-error detection is a game-changer.

For compute, Modal Labs lets you scale up/down super fast.

Overfitting? More diverse data, always. Or just… pray.



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)