Nvidia breakthrough gives 4-bit pretraining technique the accuracy of FP8 (arxiv.org)
from yogthos@lemmy.ml to technology@lemmy.ml on 14 Oct 16:36
https://lemmy.ml/post/37532938

NVIDIA just trained a 12B-parameter language model on 10 trillion tokens entirely in 4-bit precision.

Here’s why this matters:

• NVFP4 delivers 2–3× faster math throughput and 50% less memory vs FP8
• Accuracy? Practically identical. (MMLU-Pro: FP8 = 62.62%, NVFP4 = 62.58%)
• Stability issues have been solved using Random Hadamard transforms, stochastic rounding, and 2D scaling

This is the first successful demonstration of large-scale 4-bit pretraining without losing accuracy.

The next generation of frontier models will be faster, cheaper, without compromise.

#technology