I trained a 1.57B-parameter Dreamer 4 World Model from scratch for under $150

Reddit r/LocalLLaMA Models

Summary

The author trained a 1.57B-parameter Dreamer 4 world model from scratch for under $150, demonstrating the accessibility of low-cost AI model training and using procedural data for validation.

My first attempt didn't work. I built on Genie's architecture and the videos looked great, but the controls barely did anything. The effect of a keypress was basically zero. Genie learns its actions unsupervised into 8 codes, and that was too loose a grip for us. So I scrapped it and started again with Dreamer 4. The second attempt: Tokenizer at 40.41 PSNR (Genie's paper reports 35.7) FVD 32.19 end to end 144 frames before it falls apart 1.57B parameters, 9.6M frames, ~$150 Two important learnings: (1) One is that $150 is enough. You don't need a frontier lab to do this anymore, and I don't think enough people have noticed. (2) The other is the data. We generated every frame ourselves with Procgen instead of scraping video. We know the true action at every step, so we can actually check whether the model is responding to us or just making pretty motion. Website: https://worldmodel-platformer.vizuara.ai/ Code: https://github.com/RajatDandekar/dreamer4-coinrun
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@vintcessun: Pretraining can be this cost-effective? Train a usable 1B base model from scratch for ~$1000, slashing compute and data by hundreds of times. The key isn't brute-force compute, but hierarchical recursive architecture plus latent space reasoning, combined with PrefixLM packing and FA3 to maximize efficiency. Sounds insane, but the paper and code are open-sourced.

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HRM-Text released a 1B-parameter base model, claiming it can be pretrained from scratch for only ~$1000, reducing compute and data volume by hundreds of times. It employs efficient techniques such as hierarchical recursive architecture, latent space reasoning, and PrefixLM packing. The paper and code are open-sourced.

What if i really wanna train an AI from scratch?

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