Design a Distributed Training Platform for Foundation Models

Asked by: OpenAI (also common across Anthropic and other frontier labs)

Training-infrastructure questions are a signature of OpenAI, Anthropic, and other frontier-lab interviews. The canonical prompt — "design a distributed training platform for foundation models" — and its sharp follow-ups ("scale to 2000 GPUs, how do you partition parameters? if a task fails, how do you recover? if a task hangs, how do you prevent resource starvation?") are testing whether you can reason about long-running, tightly-coupled, failure-prone distributed computation where a single failure can waste thousands of GPU-hours.

This article reconstructs a strong answer.