[jagraff]

I think the median country GDP is something like $100 Billion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)

Models are expensive, but they're not that expensive.

[telotortium]

LLM model training costs arise primarily from commodity costs (GPUs and other compute as well as electricity), not locally-provided services, so PPP is not the right statistic to use here. You should use nominal GDP for this instead. According to Wikipedia[0], the median country's nominal GDP (Cyprus) is more like $39B. Still much larger than training costs, but much lower than your PPP GDP number.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

[kordlessagain]

The median country GDP is approximately $48.8 billion, which corresponds to Uganda at position 90 with $48.769 billion.

The largest economy (US) has a GDP of $27.7 trillion.

The smallest economy (Tuvalu) has a GDP of $62.3 million.

The 48 billion number represents the middle point where half of all countries have larger GDPs and half have smaller GDPs.

[hoseja]

Well then you have to agree that $48.8 billion IS "something like $100 billion".

[amelius]

Maybe it checks out if you don't use 1 year as your timeframe for GDP but the number of days required for training.

[marcosdumay]

$100 billion is the best estimate around of how much OpenAI took in investment to build ChatGPT.

[Eisenstein]

A top of the line consumer desktop, the Mac Pro, costs $7000. The commonly acknowledged first non-mechanical computer, the ENIAC, cost $400,000, which adjusted for inflation is $6,594,153 (see note). Will AI models follow the same pricing trajectory? Probably not but they no longer cost even close to $100 billion.

Note: 1946 CPI = 19.5, 2025 CPI = 321.465 which makes for an increase of 16.49.

[programjames]

Maybe for an Australian billion? But in American English it would be $100 million.

[Nicook]

does anyone even have good estimates for model training?