It depends on how big of a model you are trying to train. You can train small models on CPU but they have very limited usability. Good language models require processing of large amounts of textual data in the order of 100s of GB. Processing this much data without GPUs is not very practical. So to answer your question, it depends on the size of the model you are trying to train. To train a model that could be used practically, no it is not possible to do so without GPUs.
spam