How a 20B MoE was pre-trained for under $10/hour
const_reborn · x · 2026-07-20
A comment highlights a striking training setup from @jondurbin: a 20B MoE model was pre-trained for under $10/hour of compute.
It was not run on a cluster. Instead, the setup used eight rented single-L40S VMs spread across two continents, plus a few 4090s and a 5090, while tolerating about 6 seconds per step. The point is that pre-training — long assumed to require a large centralized cluster — can be done surprisingly cheaply with a distributed setup.
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