Reading those papers and looking at the code, it doesn't look easy. However, let's imagine that the Cheng et al team comes back with results for pretraining a few months from now, and they support the conclusions of their earlier paper. What should they do to help everyone reach a conclusion?
"If Cheng et al. had reached out to the corresponding authors of the Nature paper, we would have gladly helped them to correct these issues prior to publication" (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.10053)
That's how you actually do a reproduction study - you reach out to the corresponding authors and make sure you do everything exactly the same. But at this point, it's hard to imagine the AlphaChip folks having much patience with them.
