Maximal Update Parametrization (muP): How Tensor Programs Enable Zero-Shot Hyperparameter Transfer in LLM Pre-Training
Pre-training a frontier large language model requires hundreds of thousands of GPU hours and millions of dollars in compute. At that scale, traditional hyperparameter tuning is financially and operationally impossible: teams cannot sweep learning rates, weight initializations, or optimizer betas across multiple 70B parameter runs to find the loss minimum. Historically, practitioners relied on ad-hoc heuristic extrapolation or manual guesses from small runs, often leading to sub-optimal loss curv

