Hugging Face Engineer to Reveal Secrets of Training World-Class LLMs at CERN

Kyrannio · x · 2026-08-20

Hugging Face ML Engineer Lewis Tunstall is giving a talk at CERN titled "The Secrets to Training World-Class LLMs." The lecture will share practical lessons learned from building fully open models, covering the end-to-end process from pretraining on trillions of tokens to post-training with reinforcement learning.

Contrasting with the "rosy retrospection" of published papers, the talk will delve into the messy reality of LLM training: 2 a.m. debugging sessions, sudden loss spikes, and subtle tensor-parallelism bugs that sabotage runs—real details that never make it into final papers.

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