Assertion Supported AI assessment confidence: 95% certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Bakouch: Hugging Face research showed diminishing returns after 3 data epochs

Elie Bakouch · ⚡ Open Model Pretraining Masterclass — Elie Bakouch, HuggingFace SmolLM 3, FineWeb, FinePDF · Oct 20, 2025 · at 48:51

Elie Bakouch discusses epoch scaling and data repetition limits during open-source LLM pretraining.

0:00 / 0:16exact quote · 16.6s
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“There is this paper from actually from people at HuginFace at the time that is saying that you basically can repeat your data Like, up to three epochs before seeing diminishing gain before seeing diminishing return.”

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