Challenges of large datasets
Training LLMs requires enormous datasets, often in the terabytes or even petabytes range. This scale introduces several challenges:
- Storage requirements: Datasets can exceed the capacity of single machines, necessitating distributed storage solutions.
- Input/output (I/O) bottlenecks: Reading large volumes of data can become a significant bottleneck, limiting training speed.
- Preprocessing overhead: Tokenization and other preprocessing steps can be time-consuming at scale due to the computational overhead of processing large volumes of text data through multiple sequential operations. The challenge arises from having to perform multiple steps on each piece of text – tokenization, normalization, cleaning, language detection, and other transformations – multiplied across millions or billions of text samples. This process is inherently sequential (each step depends on the previous one), requires CPU/memory resources, and can involve...