GPT-2 is a scaled-up version of GPT-1, featuring more parameters and trained on a larger dataset. OpenAI decided not to release the full model due to concerns about potential malicious applications, opting instead to release a smaller model and a technical paper for research purposes.

GitHub repository angelos-p/llm-from-scratch offers a hands-on workshop for building a GPT training pipeline from scratch. The workshop focuses on reproducing the GPT-2 model with 124 million parameters using PyTorch.

Enabled fp8 training for GPT-2 resulted in a 4.3% reduction in training time, bringing it down to 2.91 hours. Using 8XH100 spot instance prices, the cost to reproduce GPT-2 is approximately $20.