An Overview of Machine Learning Model Training
Correction Explainers

An Overview of Machine Learning Model Training

Corrected by Emir Baycan · on When Notes Fly · 31 July 2026 · View published page ↗

Machine learning training involves initializing models, predicting, calculating loss, and updating.

Factually incorrectMissing context

What was corrected

What the page claimed

The article gave GPT-3's training cost as a range of $4 to $12 million, when the standard, widely cited independent estimate is approximately $4.6 million, with no credible source supporting a figure as high as $12 million for this particular model. It also presented LoRA's reported 10,000 times reduction in trainable parameters and 3 times reduction in GPU memory as a general property of the technique, when these specific figures come from one particular benchmark in the original paper, fine-tuning GPT-3 at 175 billion parameters.

What was corrected

The article now cites the standard $4.6 million estimate for GPT-3's training cost, while noting that OpenAI never officially disclosed the exact figure, and clarifies that LoRA's reported efficiency figures are specific to the GPT-3 175B benchmark used in the original paper rather than a fixed ratio that applies at every model size.

Why this is better

Web searches confirmed that all seven foundational research citations in this article, spanning backpropagation, LSTMs, weight initialization, residual networks, the Adam optimizer, cyclical learning rates, and neural scaling laws, matched the real published record precisely, along with the great majority of the specific figures in the article's real-world case studies. Only the GPT-3 cost estimate and the scope of the LoRA efficiency figures needed correction.

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