3USD/hour on the H100 is much more expensive than a reasonable amortized full ownership cost, unless one assumes the GPU is useless within 18 months, which I find a bit dramatic. The MFU can be above 40% and certainly well above the 35% in the estimate, also for small models with plain pytorch and trivial tuning [1] I didnt read the linked paper carefully but I seriously doubt the google team used vocab embedding layers with 2 D V parameters stated in the link, because this would be suboptimal by not tying the weights of the token embedding layer in the decoder architecture (even if they did double the params in these layers, it would not lead to 6 D V compute because the embedding input is indexed). To me these assumptions suggested a somewhat careless attitude towards the cost estimation and so I stopped reading the rest of this analysis carefully. My best guess is that the author is off by a large factor in the upward direction, and a true replication with H100/200 could be about 3x less expensive.
[1] if the total cost estimate was relatively low, say less than 10k, then of course the lowest rental price and a random training codebase might make some sense in order to reduce administrative costs; once the cost is in the ballpark of millions of USD, it feels careless to avoid optimizing it further. There exist H100s in firesales or Ebay occasionally, which could reduce the cost even more, but the author already mentions 2USD/gpu/hour for bulk rental compute, which is better than the 3USD/gpu/hour estimate they used in the writeup.
[1] if the total cost estimate was relatively low, say less than 10k, then of course the lowest rental price and a random training codebase might make some sense in order to reduce administrative costs; once the cost is in the ballpark of millions of USD, it feels careless to avoid optimizing it further. There exist H100s in firesales or Ebay occasionally, which could reduce the cost even more, but the author already mentions 2USD/gpu/hour for bulk rental compute, which is better than the 3USD/gpu/hour estimate they used in the writeup.