MiMo RL'd their latest models for $3.5M (million, not billion). It's hardware, software, and algos
Also look to the history of stable diffusion
Training costs are not in free fall, and not every "post training" process is equal, Everyone does this differently. The costs certainly haven't gone down, to train a new 10T param model from scratch, like at all.
You cannot point at Xiaomis tiny model and compare it to training a 10T param model. The levels of dunning krueger are getting out of hand.
You also arent calculating the salaries of the people involved, of which there's only a few thousand worldwide in your hiring pool.
I believe that’s post-training, not pre-training.