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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   9576 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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We don't have a lot of data points for costs. But for what it's worth, V4-Pro-Preview scored 44 on Artificial Analysis. Semianalysis says of Korean Motif:

Motif is a sub 30 person startup that released their first pre-trained model, which was only 2.6B total parameters, last June. They’ve raised just $17M and have access to a mere 768 B200s (< 2MW).

They have reached 47 with Motif 3. Its pretraining budget is ≈10x below V4 (given active parameters x tokens). It's definitely doable to train something like V4 for under $30M. I mainly hedge because of apparent troubles DeepSeek had with Huawei.

Huh. I know Motif's gotten mixed reviews, but even assuming it benchmaxxed a little, that's still well outside my intuitions. And A lot of the South Korea stuff is explicitly competitive to get government support, so that excludes the free electricity option. Guess I'm behind the power curve, here.

That said, Motif lost the competition to chaebols, for usual anti-meritocratic Worst Korea reasons.

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