Research Michael Barlow 22/05/2026 TL;DR: Model training has grown complex enough to require many specialised stages and teams, and manual coordination between them doesn’t scale. At Aleph Alpha, we’ve built Savanna, a model factory that implements the entire training pipeline in code, turning model training into a collaborative software project. In Savanna, end-to-end training runs are hermetic, and launchable with one click. This post describes Savanna, why it’s needed, and the engineering culture that makes it effective. Introduction Model training is moving fast. New stages keep joining the pipeline and existing ones grow more intricate, making model training an engineering challenge for three key reasons. First, more complexity means more room for error: bugs or inconsistencies in data, code, or configuration can cause entire training runs to fail or diverge. Second, the cost of failure keeps rising: models grow larger, GPU prices rise, and ever more data is processed per run.…