@simplifyinAI: BREAKING: NVIDIA proved back-propagation isn't the only way to build an AI. Billion-parameter models were trained witho…

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Summary

NVIDIA and Oxford University introduced EGGROLL, a scalable evolution strategies algorithm that trains billion-parameter models without backpropagation, using only integers and parallel mutations.

BREAKING: NVIDIA proved back-propagation isn't the only way to build an AI. Billion-parameter models were trained without a single gradient. No calculus, no exploding memory, no massive GPU clusters. The culprit? A long-dismissed technique called Evolution Strategies. NVIDIA and Oxford just made it scalable with EGGROLL, which replaces bloated mutation matrices with two tiny ones, enabling hundreds of thousands of parallel mutations at inference-level speed. They're pretraining models from scratch using only simple integers. No backprop. No decimals. We assumed the future of AI required endless precision hardware. Evolution had other plans.
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