Raschka: with $100M for a top LLM, spend it all on post-training, not pretraining

MaziyarPanahi · x · 2026-09-20

Asked on a podcast how he'd spend $100M to build a state-of-the-art LLM, researcher Sebastian Raschka said he wouldn't pretrain from scratch — he'd pick an existing model and invest the full budget in post-training. Maziyar Panahi agreed, noting existing models have already seen 30T-40T tokens, and pointed to GLM-5.3 as proof that the same base model can go far with better post-training alone.

Related event: Raschka would spend a $100M LLM budget entirely on post-training(3 posts)→

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