A developer detailed the true costs of training a custom Large Language Model (LLM) from scratch in 2025, contrasting it with a popular tutorial. While training a small 10M parameter model for educational purposes is inexpensive at $0.34, scaling to a 1B parameter model requires significant resources. Such a scaled model would take approximately 694 hours on an RTX 4090, costing around $305, and this estimate doesn't account for potential interruptions. AI
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IMPACT Training LLMs from scratch is prohibitively expensive for most, reinforcing the value of existing foundational models for practical applications.
RANK_REASON Developer's personal experience and cost analysis of training an LLM from scratch, presented as a blog post.