Frontier Model Training Methodologies

How do labs train a frontier, multi-billion parameter model? We look towards seven open-weight frontier models: Hugging Face’s SmolLM3, Prime Intellect’s Intellect 3, Nous Research’s Hermes 4, OpenAI’s gpt-oss-120b, Moonshot’s Kimi K2, DeepSeek’s DeepSeek-R1, and Arcee’s Trinity series. This blog is an attempt at distilling the techniques, motivations, and considerations used to train their models with an emphasis on training methodology over infrastructure.

These notes are largely structured based on Hugging Face’s SmolLM3 report due to its extensiveness, and it is currently supplemented with notes from other reports including Intellect-3, gpt-oss-120b, Hermes 4, DeepSeek, and Kimi. While this blog explores some infrastructure-related ideas like in-flight weight updates and multi-client orchestrators, there are many other ideas mentioned throughout those posts/blogs like expert parallelism and quantization. Hugging Face writes more about gpt-oss-120b’s infrastructure here.