Paper · arXiv 2406.17557
The FineWeb Datasets: Decanting the Web for the Finest Text Data at Scale
Guilherme Penedo, Hynek Kydlíček, Loubna Ben allal, Anton Lozhkov, Margaret Mitchell, Colin Raffel, Leandro Von Werra, Thomas Wolf
FineWeb, a 15-trillion token dataset from Common Crawl snapshots, outperforms other open datasets in LLM training, and its educational subset, FineWeb-Edu, significantly improves performance on knowledge and reasoning benchmarks.
Abstract
The performance of a large language model (LLM) depends heavily on the quality and size of its pretraining dataset. However, the pretraining datasets for state-of-the-art open LLMs like Llama 3 and Mixtral are not publicly available and very little is known about how they were created. In this work, we introduce FineWeb, a 15-trillion token dataset derived from 96 Common Crawl snapshots that produces better-performing LLMs than other open pretraining datasets. To advance the understanding of how best to curate high-quality pretraining datasets, we carefully document and ablate all of the design choices used in FineWeb, including in-depth investigations of deduplication and filtering strategies. In addition, we introduce FineWeb-Edu, a 1.3-trillion token collection of educational text filtered from FineWeb. LLMs pretrained on FineWeb-Edu exhibit dramatically better performance on knowledge- and reasoning-intensive benchmarks like MMLU and ARC. Along with our datasets, we publicly release our data curation codebase and all of the models trained during our ablation experiments.