SMRTR AIJul 29, 2026Giles Thomas Blog

Why do OpenAI's GPT-2 weights beat mine?

SMRTR summary

A developer training a GPT-2-style language model from scratch noticed OpenAI's original GPT-2 small weights consistently outperformed their own models on instruction-following tasks, even when their models achieved better technical loss scores. The gap likely stems from data quality and "overtraining" — OpenAI trained on far more tokens than the standard Chinchilla-optimal formula, which may produce better-positioned model weights for fine-tuning.

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