Discussing Compute Bottlenecks at ICML
avt_im · x · 2026-07-20
In a conversation at ICML, the author heard a student of Jimmy Ba say that his biggest bottleneck in doing LLM reinforcement learning research was not having enough compute to run meaningful experiments. If even he faces this, it's much harder for other researchers to push forward.\n\nA follow-up point added that without Chinese open-source toolchains helping to squeeze every drop of performance out of existing GPUs, he likely wouldn't have been able to complete this work or acquire the skills needed for today's cutting-edge experiments.
Related event: Academic Compute Bottlenecks Partly Eased by Chinese Open Source Tools(3 posts)→
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