Pretraining

What Pretraining is

Pretraining produces the base model: fluent and knowledgeable but not yet an obedient assistant.

How it works

Data is collected, filtered, de-duplicated and decontaminated, then streamed through the model with a next-token objective across thousands of accelerators for weeks. Checkpoints, loss curves and evaluation runs monitor progress.

Why it matters

Pretraining decides the ceiling of what later stages can achieve, and it is the barrier that keeps frontier model creation limited to well-funded labs.

Common uses

• →Building base models
• →Domain-specific continued pretraining