Pre-training LLMs: One Model To Rule Them All? with Talfan Evans, DeepMind

Talfan Evans is a research engineer at DeepMind, where he focuses on data curation and foundational research for pre-training LLMs and multimodal models like Gemini. I ask Talfan:

• Will one model rule them all?
• What does "high quality data" actually mean in the context of LLM training?
• Is language model pre-training becoming commoditized?
• Are companies like Google and OpenAI keeping their AI secrets to themselves?
• Does the startup or open source community stand a chance next to the giants?

Also check out Talfan's latest paper at DeepMind, Bad Students Make Good Teachers.