Glossary term
Glossary term
Infrastructure and Serving
The practical training power achieved through hardware, algorithms, data quality, architecture, and efficiency improvements. It matters because capability can increase even when raw compute does not. Effective compute helps explain why governance cannot rely only on raw hardware thresholds; algorithms and data improvements can shift capability quickly.
Epoch AI's effective compute analyses estimate algorithmic progress equivalent to multiple-times compute increases per year.
Hoffmann et al. (Chinchilla, 2022) reframed compute-optimal training, shifting the field toward more training data per parameter.
Distillation methods such as DistilBERT and TinyLlama achieve high effective capability with reduced raw compute, illustrating effective compute gains.