How LLMs work, part 5: pretraining and scaling laws

The math and the architecture are only the foundation. A model becomes smart by reading an enormous amount of text and learning to predict what comes next. That stage is called pretraining. This is part 5 of our series on how LLMs work. You will learn how raw text becomes training examples, what one training step and one epoch are, where the data comes from and how it is cleaned, and why bigger models trained on more data keep getting better.