High Cost & High Risk with AI

This image illustrates the high cost and high risk of AI/LLM (Large Language Model) training.

Key Analysis

Left: AI/LLM Growth Path

  • Evolution from Internet → Mobile & Cloud → AI/LLM (Transformer)
  • Each stage shows increasing fluctuations in the graph
  • Emphasizes “High Cost, High Risk” message

Center: Real Problem Visualization

The red graph shows dramatic performance spikes that occurred during actual training processes.

Top Right: Silent Data Corruption (SDC) Issues

Silent data corruption from hardware failures:

  • Power drops, thermal stress → hardware faults
  • Silent errors → training divergence
  • 6 SDC failures in a 54-day pretraining run

Bottom Right: Reliability Issues in Large-Scale ML Clusters (Meta Case)

Real failure cases:

  • 8-GPU job: average 47.7 days
  • 1024-GPU job: MTTF (Mean Time To Failure) 7.9 hours
  • 16,384-GPU job: failure in approximately 1.8 hours

Summary

  1. As GPU scale increases, failure probability rises exponentially, making large-scale AI training extremely costly and technically risky.
  2. Hardware-induced silent data corruption causes training divergence, with 6 failures recorded in just 54 days of pretraining.
  3. Meta’s experience shows massive GPU clusters can fail in under 2 hours, highlighting infrastructure reliability as a critical challenge.

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