"My basic perception is that's it's insane they went bf16/dense -- feels like a 4x algorithmic hit" Well, dense makes inference cheaper and more memory-efficient at the cost of less compute-efficient training, right?
• Managing complexity. We make design choices that seek to maximize our ability to scale the model development process. For example, we opt for a standard dense Transformer model architecture (Vaswani et al., 2017) with minor adaptations, rather than for a mixture-of-experts model (Shazeer et al., 2017) to maximize training stability. Similarly, we adopt a relatively simple post-training procedure based on supervised finetuning (SFT), rejection sampling (RS), and direct preference optimization (DPO; Rafailov et al. (2023)) as opposed to more complex reinforcement learning algorithms (Ouyang et al., 2022; Schulman et al., 2017) that tend to be less stable and harder to scale