⚙️ AI Hardware

Training VLMs 'From Scratch'? It's a $100M Lie Nobody Buys Anymore

Labs ditched true scratch training after it devoured $100M in compute for mediocre results. Now it's all Frankenstein mods on pre-trained giants.

Elena Vasquez 📅 Mar 19, 2026 ⏱️ 4 min read 👁️ 5 views

⚡ Key Takeaways

VLMs aren't trained from scratch; they mod pre-trained ViT, Q-Former, and LMs to slash costs.
Frozen backbones prevent overfitting; adapters like Q-Former bridge vision-text gaps.
Modular approach commoditizes VLMs, predicting open-source dominance by 2028.

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Senior editor at theAIcatchup. Generalist covering the biggest AI stories with a sharp, skeptical eye.

#Q-Former #VLM training #ViT backbone #Vision-Language Models #vlm-finetuning

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Originally reported by Towards Data Science