Disclosure certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Bakouch: Hugging Face introduces code and math in 1T+ token phase

Elie Bakouch · ⚡ Open Model Pretraining Masterclass — Elie Bakouch, HuggingFace SmolLM 3, FineWeb, FinePDF · Oct 20, 2025 · at 52:36

Elie Bakouch, pretraining lead at Hugging Face, explains how Hugging Face shifts its dataset composition away from web data during late/mid training.

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“We are basically introducing higher quality data like I don't know where it is, but if you look at the different phase, we are basically adding more code and math through the train and less web data. But we're only doing it like one point trillion token.”

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