pretraining
The stage of training a model's general capabilities on large-scale data.
Pretraining is the stage in which a model first learns general capabilities from large-scale data. For large language models, the typical approach is learning to predict the next token across vast amounts of text. The resulting model is then adapted to specific uses through fine-tuning or further training.
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In September 2026, an Anthropic pretraining researcher resigned with a viral post accusing leading labs of racing recklessly toward self-improving superintellig…